Tales at Twilight
Date: 1867-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Horror; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Victorian Fiction
Description: This small collection presents the supernatural fiction of popular Victorian author Rhoda Broughton. Whether describing ghostly manifestations, prescient visions of death, or other mysterious occurrences, her stories often manage to give a new twist to folkloric elements, sometimes laced with threads of sly humor.
Publisher: MobileRead
Rights: Text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

Tales Told at Twilight

STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL
BY
Rhoda Broughton

CONTENTS:

The Truth, the Whole Truth,
and Nothing but the Truth

The Man with the Nose
Behold, It Was a Dream!
Poor Pretty Bobby
Betty’s Visions
Mrs. Smith of Longmains
His Serene Highness
Under the Cloak

…About This eBook

The Truth, the Whole Truth,
and Nothing but the Truth

(1868)

Mrs. DE WYNT TO Mrs. MONTRESOR.

18, Eccleston Square,
May 5th.

My dearest Cecilia,

Talk of the friendships of Orestes and Pylades, of Julie and Claire, what are they to ours? Did Pylades ever go ventre à terre, half over London on a day more broiling than any but an âme damnée could even imagine, in order that Orestes might be comfortably housed for the season?

Did Claire ever hold sweet converse with from fifty to one hundred house agents, in order that Julie might have three windows to her drawing-room and a pretty portière? You see I am determined not to be done out of my full meed of gratitude.

Well, my friend, I had no idea till yesterday how closely we were packed in this great smoky beehive, as tightly as herrings in a barrel. Don’t be frightened, however. By dint of squeezing and crowding, we have managed to make room for two more herrings in our barrel, and those two are yourself and your other self, i.e. your husband. Let me begin at the beginning. After having looked over, I verily believe, every undesirable residence in West London; after having seen nothing intermediate between what was suited to the means of a duke, and what was suited to the needs of a chimney-sweep; after having felt bed-ticking, and explored kitchen-ranges till my brain reeled under my accumulated experience, I arrived at about half-past five yesterday afternoon at 32, ——— Street, May Fair.

“Failure No. 253, I don’t doubt,” I said to myself, as I toiled up the steps with my soul athirst for afternoon tea, and feeling as ill-tempered as you please. So much for my spirit of prophecy.

Fate, I have noticed, is often fond of contradicting us flat, and giving the lie to our little predictions. Once inside, I thought I had got into a small compartment of Heaven by mistake.

Fresh as a daisy, clean as a cherry, bright as a seraph’s face, it is all these, and a hundred more, only that my limited stock of similes is exhausted. Two drawing-rooms as pretty as ever woman crammed with people she did not care two straws about; white curtains with rose-coloured ones underneath, festooned in the sweetest way; marvellously, immorally becoming, my dear, as I ascertained entirely for your benefit, in the mirrors, of which there are about a dozen and a half; Persian mats, easy chairs, and lounges suited to every possible physical conformation, from the Apollo Belvedere to Miss Biffin; and a thousand of the important little trivialities that make up the sum of a woman’s life: peacock fans, Japanese screens, naked boys and décolletée shepherdesses; not to speak of a family of china pugs, with blue ribbons round their necks, which ought of themselves to have added fifty pounds a year to the rent. Apropos, I asked, in fear and trembling, what the rent might be— “Three hundred pounds a year.” A feather would have knocked me down. I could hardly believe my ears, and made the woman repeat it several times, that there might be no mistake. To this hour it is a mystery to me.

With that suspiciousness which is so characteristic of you, you will immediately begin to hint that there must be some terrible unaccountable smell, or some odious inexplicable noise haunting the reception-rooms. Nothing of the kind, the woman assured me, and she did not look as if she were telling stories. You will next suggest—remembering the rose-coloured curtains—that its last occupant was a member of the demi-monde. Wrong again. Its last occupant was an elderly and unexceptionable Indian officer, without a liver, and with a most lawful wife. They did not stay long, it is true, but then, as the housekeeper told me, he was a deplorable old hypochondriac, who never could bear to stay a fortnight in any one place. So lay aside that scepticism, which is your besetting sin, and give unfeigned thanks to St Brigitta, or St Gengulpha, or St Catherine of Siena, or whoever is your tutelar saint, for having provided you with a palace at the cost of a hovel, and for having sent you such an invaluable friend as

Your attached

Elizabeth De Wynt.

P.S.—I am so sorry I shall not be in town to witness your first raptures, but dear Artie looks so pale and thin and tall after the whooping-cough, that I am sending him off at once to the sea, and as I cannot bear the child out of my sight, I am going into banishment likewise.

•    •    •    •

Mrs. MONTRESOR TO Mrs. DE WYNT.

32, ——— Street, May Fair,
May 14th.

Dearest Bessy,

Why did not dear little Artie defer his whooping-cough convalescence till August? It is very odd, to me, the perverse way in which children always fix upon the most inconvenient times and seasons for their diseases. Here we are installed in our Paradise, and have searched high and low, in every hole and corner, for the serpent, without succeeding in catching a glimpse of his spotted tail. Most things in this world are disappointing, but 32, ——— Street, May Fair, is not. The mystery of the rent is still a mystery. I have been for my first ride in the Row this morning; my horse was a little fidgety; I am half afraid that my nerve is not what it was. I saw heaps of people I knew. Do you recollect Florence Watson? What a wealth of red hair she had last year! Well, that same wealth is black as the raven’s wing this year! I wonder how people can make such walking impositions of themselves, don’t you? Adela comes to us next week; I am so glad. It is dull driving by oneself of an afternoon; and I always think that one young woman alone in a brougham, or with only a dog beside her, does not look good. We sent round our cards a fortnight before we came up, and have been already deluged with callers. Considering that we have been two years exiled from civilised life, and that London memories are not generally of the longest, we shall do pretty well, I think. Ralph Gordon came to see me on Sunday; he is in the ——th Hussars now. He has grown up such a dear fellow, and so good-looking! Just my style, large and fair and whiskerless! Most men nowadays make themselves as like monkeys, or Scotch terriers, as they possibly can. I intend to be quite a mother to him. Dresses are gored to as indecent an extent as ever; short skirts are rampant. I am sorry; I hate them. They make tall women look lank, and short ones insignificant. A knock! Peace is a word that might as well be expunged from one’s London dictionary.

Yours affectionately,

Cecilia Montresor.

•    •    •    •

Mrs. DE WYNT TO Mrs. MONTRESOR.

The Lord Warden, Dover,
May 18th.

Dearest Cecilia,

You will perceive that I am about to devote only one small sheet of note-paper to you. This is from no dearth of time, Heaven knows! time is a drug in the market here, but from a total dearth of ideas. Any ideas that I ever have, come to me from without, from external objects; I am not clever enough to generate any within myself. My life here is not an eminently suggestive one. It is spent digging with a wooden spade, and eating prawns. Those are my employments at least; my relaxation is going down to the Pier, to see the Calais boat come in. When one is miserable oneself, it is decidedly consolatory to see someone more miserable still; and wretched and bored, and reluctant vegetable as I am, I am not sea-sick. I always feel my spirits rise after having seen that peevish, draggled procession of blue, green and yellow fellow-Christians file past me. There is a wind here always, in comparison of which the wind that behaved so violently to the corners of Job’s house was a mere zephyr. There are heights to climb which require more daring perseverance than ever Wolfe displayed, with his paltry heights of Abraham. There are glaring white houses, glaring white roads, glaring white cliffs. If any one knew how unpatriotically I detest the chalk-cliffs of Albion! Having grumbled through my two little pages—I have actually been reduced to writing very large in order to fill even them—I will send off my dreary little billet. How I wish I could get into the envelope myself too, and whirl up with it to dear, beautiful, filthy London. Not more heavily could Madame de Staël have sighed for Paris from among the shades of Coppet.

Your disconsolate,

Bessy.

•    •    •    •

Mrs. MONTRESOR TO Mrs. DE WYNT.

32, ——— Street, May Fair,
May 27th.

Oh, my dearest Bessy, how I wish we were out of this dreadful, dreadful house! Please don’t think me very ungrateful for saying this, after your taking such pains to provide us with a Heaven upon earth, as you thought.

What has happened could, of course, have been neither foretold, nor guarded against, by any human being. About ten days ago, Benson (my maid) came to me with a very long face, and said, “If you please, ’m, did you know that this house was haunted?” I was so startled: you know what a coward I am. I said, “Good Heavens! No! is it?” “Well, ’m, I’m pretty nigh sure it is,” she said, and the expression of her countenance was about as lively as an undertaker’s; and then she told me that cook had been that morning to order groceries from a shop in the neighbourhood, and on her giving the man the direction where to send the things to, he had said, with a very peculiar smile, “No. 32, ——— Street, eh? h’m? I wonder how long you’ll stand it; last lot held out just a fortnight.” He looked so odd that she asked him what he meant, but he only said, “Oh! nothing! only that parties never did stay long at 32. He had known parties go in one day, and out the next, and during the last four years he had never known any remain over the month.” Feeling a good deal alarmed by this information, she naturally inquired the reason; but he declined to give it, saying that if she had not found it out for herself, she had much better leave it alone, as it would only frighten her out of her wits; and on her insisting and urging him, she could only extract from him, that the house had such a villainously bad name, that the owners were glad to let it for a mere song. You know how firmly I believe in apparitions, and what an unutterable fear I have of them: anything material, tangible, that I can lay hold of—anything of the same fibre, blood, and bone as myself, I could, I think, confront bravely enough; but the mere thought of being brought face to face with the “bodiless dead”, makes my brain unsteady. The moment Henry came in, I ran to him, and told him; but he pooh-poohed the whole story, laughed at me, and asked whether we should turn out of the prettiest house in London, at the very height of the season, because a grocer said it had a bad name. Most good things that had ever been in the world had had a bad name in their day; and, moreover, the man had probably a motive for taking away the house’s character, some friend for whom he coveted the charming situation and the low rent. He derided my “babyish fears”, as he called them, to such an extent that I felt half ashamed, and yet not quite comfortable either; and then came the usual rush of London engagements, during which one has no time to think of anything but how to speak, and act, and look for the moment then present. Adela was to arrive yesterday, and in the morning our weekly hamper of flowers, fruit, and vegetables arrived from home. I always dress the flower vases myself, servants are so tasteless; and as I was arranging them, it occurred to me—you know Adela’s passion for flowers—to carry up one particular cornucopia of roses and mignonette and set it on her toilet-table, as a pleasant surprise for her. As I came downstairs, I had seen the housemaid—a fresh, round-faced country girl—go into the room, which was being prepared for Adela, with a pair of sheets that had been airing over her arm. I went upstairs very slowly, as my cornucopia was full of water, and I was afraid of spilling some. I turned the handle of the bedroom-door and entered, keeping my eyes fixed on my flowers, to see how they bore the transit, and whether any of them had fallen out. Suddenly a sort of shiver passed over me; and feeling frightened—I did not know why—I looked up quickly. The girl was standing by the bed, leaning forward a little with her hands clenched in each other, rigid, every nerve tense; her eyes, wide open, starting out of her head, and a look of unutterable stony horror in them; her cheeks and mouth not pale, but livid as those of one that died awhile ago in mortal pain. As I looked at her, her lips moved a little, and an awful hoarse voice, not like hers in the least, said, “Oh! my God, I have seen it!” and then she fell down suddenly, like a log, with a heavy noise. Hearing the noise, loudly audible all through the thin walls and floors of a London house, Benson came running in, and between us we managed to lift her on to the bed, and tried to bring her to herself by rubbing her feet and hands, and holding strong salts to her nostrils. And all the while we kept glancing over our shoulders, in a vague cold terror of seeing some awful, shapeless apparition. Two long hours she lay in a state of utter unconsciousness. Meanwhile Harry, who had been down to his club, returned. At the end of two hours we succeeded in bringing her back to sensation and life, but only to make the awful discovery that she was raving mad. She became so violent that it required all the combined strength of Harry and Phillips (our butler) to hold her down in the bed. Of course, we sent off instantly for a doctor, who on her growing a little calmer towards evening, removed her in a cab to his own house. He has just been here to tell me that she is now pretty quiet, not from any return to sanity, but from sheer exhaustion. We are, of course, utterly in the dark as to what she saw, and her ravings are far too disconnected and unintelligible to afford us the slightest clue. I feel so completely shattered and upset by this awful occurrence, that you will excuse me, dear, I’m sure, if I write incoherently. One thing I need hardly tell you, and that is, that no earthly consideration would induce me to allow Adela to occupy that terrible room. I shudder and run by quickly as I pass the door.

Yours, in great agitation,

Cecilia.

•    •    •    •

Mrs. DE WYNT TO Mrs. MONTRESOR.

The Lord Warden, Dover,
May 28th.

Dearest Cecilia,

Yours just come; how very dreadful! But I am still unconvinced as to house being in fault. You know I feel a sort of godmother to it, and responsible for its good behaviour. Don’t you think that what the girl had might have been a fit? Why not? I myself have a cousin who is subject to seizures of the kind, and immediately on being attacked his whole body becomes rigid, his eyes glassy and staring, his complexion livid, exactly as in the case you describe. Or, if not a fit, are you sure that she has not been subject to fits of madness? Please be sure and ascertain whether there is not insanity in her family. It is so common nowadays, and so much on the increase, that nothing is more likely. You know my utter disbelief in ghosts. I am convinced that most of them, if run to earth, would turn out about as genuine as the famed Cock Lane one. But even allowing the possibility, nay, the actual unquestioned existence of ghosts in the abstract, is it likely that there should be anything to be seen so horribly fear-inspiring, as to send a perfectly sane person in one instant raving mad, which you, after three weeks’ residence in the house, have never caught a glimpse of? According to your hypothesis, your whole household ought, by this time, to be stark staring mad. Let me implore you not to give way to a panic which may, possibly, probably prove utterly groundless. Oh, how I wish I were with you, to make you listen to reason!

Artie ought to be the best prop ever woman’s old age was furnished with, to indemnify me for all he and his whooping-cough have made me suffer. Write immediately, please, and tell me how the poor patient progresses. Oh, had I the wings of a dove! I shall be on wires till I hear again.

Yours,

Bessy.

•    •    •    •

Mrs. MONTRESOR TO Mrs. DE WYNT.

No. 5, Bolton Street, Piccadilly,
June 12th.

Dearest Bessy,

You will see that we have left that terrible, hateful, fatal house. How I wish we had escaped from it sooner! Oh, my dear Bessy, I shall never be the same woman again if I live to be a hundred. Let me try to be coherent, and to tell you connectedly what has happened. And first, as to the housemaid, she has been removed to a lunatic asylum, where she remains in much the same state. She has had several lucid intervals, and during them has been closely, pressingly questioned as to what it was she saw; but she has maintained an absolute, hopeless silence, and only shudders, moans, and hides her face in her hands when the subject is broached. Three days ago I went to see her, and on my return was sitting resting in the drawing-room, before going to dress for dinner, talking to Adela about my visit, when Ralph Gordon walked in. He has always been walking in the last ten days, and Adela has always flushed up and looked very happy, poor little cat, whenever he made his appearance. He looked very handsome, dear fellow, just come in from the park; seemed in tremendous spirits, and was as sceptical as even you could be, as to the ghostly origin of Sarah’s seizure. “Let me come here tonight and sleep in that room; do, Mrs. Montresor,” he said, looking very eager and excited. “With the gas lit and a poker, I’ll engage to exorcise every demon that shows his ugly nose; even if I should find–

“Seven white ghostisses

Sitting on seven white postisses.”

“You don’t mean really?” I asked, incredulously. “Don’t I? that’s all,” he answered emphatically. “I should like nothing better. Well, is it a bargain?” Adela turned quite pale. “Oh, don’t,” she said, hurriedly, “please, don’t! why should you run such a risk? How do you know that you might not be sent mad too?” He laughed very heartily, and coloured a little with pleasure at seeing the interest she took in his safety. “Never fear,” he said, “it would take more than a whole squadron of departed ones, with the old gentleman at their head, to send me crazy.” He was so eager, so persistent, so thoroughly in earnest, that I yielded at last, though with a certain strong reluctance, to his entreaties. Adela’s blue eyes filled with tears, and she walked away hastily to the conservatory, and stood picking bits of heliotrope to hide them. Nevertheless, Ralph got his own way; it was so difficult to refuse him anything. We gave up all our engagements for the evening, and he did the same with his. At about ten o’clock he arrived, accompanied by a friend and brother officer, Captain Burton, who was anxious to see the result of the experiment. “Let me go up at once,” he said, looking very happy and animated. “I don’t know when I have felt in such good tune; a new sensation is a luxury not to be had every day of one’s life; turn the gas up as high as it will go; provide a good stout poker, and leave the issue to Providence and me.” We did as he bid. “It’s all ready now,” Henry said, coming downstairs after having obeyed his orders; “the room is nearly as light as day. Well, good luck to you, old fellow!” “Good-bye, Miss Bruce,” Ralph said, going over to Adela, and taking her hand with a look, half laughing, half sentimental—

“Fare thee well, and if for ever

Then for ever, fare thee well,

that is my last dying speech and confession. Now mind,” he went on, standing by the table, and addressing us all; “if I ring once, don’t come. I may be flurried, and lay hold of the bell without thinking; if I ring twice, come.” Then he went, jumping up the stairs three steps at a time, and humming a tune. As for us, we sat in different attitudes of expectation and listening about the drawing-room. At first we tried to talk a little, but it would not do; our whole souls seemed to have passed into our ears. The clock’s ticking sounded as loud as a great church bell close to one’s ear. Addy lay on the sofa, with her dear little white face hidden in the cushions. So we sat for exactly an hour; but it seemed like two years, and just as the clock began to strike eleven, a sharp ting, ting, ting, rang clear and shrill through the house. “Let us go,” said Addy, starting up and running to the door. “Let us go,” I cried too, following her. But Captain Burton stood in the way, and intercepted our progress. “No,” he said, decisively, “you must not go; remember Gordon told us distinctly, if he rang once not to come. I know the sort of fellow he is, and that nothing would annoy him more than having his directions disregarded.”

“Oh, nonsense!” Addy cried passionately, “he would never have rung if he had not seen something dreadful; do, do let us go!” she ended, clasping her hands. But she was overruled, and we all went back to our seats. Ten minutes more of suspense, next door to unendurable; I felt a lump in my throat, a gasping for breath;—ten minutes on the clock, but a thousand centuries on our hearts. Then again, loud, sudden, violent, the bell rang! We made a simultaneous rush to the door. I don’t think we were one second flying upstairs. Addy was first. Almost simultaneously she and I burst into the room. There he was, standing in the middle of the floor, rigid, petrified, with that same look—that look that is burnt into my heart in letters of fire—of awful, unspeakable, stony fear on his brave young face. For one instant he stood thus; then stretching out his arms stiffly before him, he groaned in a terrible, husky voice, “Oh, my God! I have seen it!” and fell down dead. Yes, dead. Not in a swoon or in a fit, but dead. Vainly we tried to bring back the life to that strong young heart; it will never come back again till that day when the earth and the sea give up the dead that are therein. I cannot see the page for the tears that are blinding me; he was such a dear fellow! I can’t write any more today.

Your broken-hearted

Cecilia.

•    •    •    •

This is a true story.

The Man with the Nose

(1872)

I

“Let us get a map and see what places look pleasantest,” says she.

“As for that,” reply I, “on a map most places look equally pleasant.”

“Never mind; get one!”

I obey.

“Do you like the seaside?” asks Elizabeth, lifting her little brown head and her small happy white face from the English sea-coast along which her forefinger is slowly travelling.

“Since you ask me, distinctly no,” reply I, for once venturing to have a decided opinion of my own, which during the last few weeks of imbecility I can be hardly said to have had. “I broke my last wooden spade five and twenty years ago. I have but a poor opinion of cockles—sandy red-nosed things, are not they? and the air always makes me bilious.”

“Then we certainly will not go there,” says Elizabeth, laughing. “A bilious bridegroom! alliterative but horrible! None of our friends show the least eagerness to lend us their country house.”

“Oh that God would put it into the hearts of men to take their wives straight home, as their fathers did!” say I with a cross groan.

“It is evident, therefore, that we must go somewhere,” returns she, not heeding the aspiration contained in my last speech, making her forefinger resume its employment, and reaching Torquay.

“I suppose so,” say I, with a sort of sigh; “for once in our lives we must resign ourselves to having the finger of derision pointed at us by waiters and landlords.”

“You shall leave your new portmanteau at home, and I will leave all my best clothes, and nobody will guess that we are bride and bridegroom; they will think that we have been married—oh, ever since the world began” (opening her eyes very wide).

I shake my head. “With an old portmanteau and in rags we shall still have the mark of the beast upon us.”

“Do you mind much? do you hate being ridiculous?” asks Elizabeth, meekly, rather depressed by my view of the case; “because if so, let us go somewhere out of the way, where there will be very few people to laugh at us.”

“On the contrary,” return I, stoutly, “we will betake ourselves to some spot where such as we do chiefly congregate—where we shall be swallowed up and lost in the multitude of our fellow-sinners.” A pause devoted to reflection. “What do you say to Killarney?” say I cheerfully.

“There are a great many fleas there, I believe,” replies Elizabeth, slowly; “flea-bites make large lumps on me; you would not like me if I were covered with large lumps.”

At the hideous ideal picture thus presented to me by my little beloved I relapse into inarticulate idiocy; emerging from which by-and-by, I suggest, “The Lakes?” My arm is round her, and I feel her supple body shiver though it is mid-July and the bees are booming about in the still and sleepy noon garden outside.

“Oh—no—no—not there!”

“Why such emphasis?” I ask gaily; “more fleas? At this rate, and with this sine quâ non, our choice will grow limited.”

“Something dreadful happened to me there,” she says, with another shudder. “But indeed I did not think there was any harm in it—I never thought anything would come of it.”

“What the devil was it?” cry I, in a jealous heat and hurry; “what the mischief did you do, and why have not you told me about it before?”

“I did not do much,” she answers meekly, seeking for my hand, and when found kissing it in timid deprecation of my wrath; “but I was ill—very ill—there; I had a nervous fever. I was in a bed hung with a chintz with a red and green fern-leaf pattern on it. I have always hated red and green fern-leaf chintzes ever since.”

“It would be possible to avoid the obnoxious bed, would it not?” say I, laughing a little. “Where does it lie? Windermere? Ulleswater? Wastwater? Where?”

“We were at Ulleswater,” she says, speaking rapidly, while a hot colour grows on her small white cheeks—“Papa, mamma, and I; and there came a mesmeriser to Penrith, and we went to see him—everybody did—and he asked leave to mesmerise me—he said I should be such a good medium—and—and—I did not know what it was like. I thought it would be quite good fun—and—and—I let him.”

She is trembling exceedingly; even the loving pressure of my arms cannot abate her shivering.

“Well?”

“And after that I do not remember anything—I believe I did all sorts of extraordinary things that he told me—sang and danced, and made a fool of myself—but when I came home I was very ill, very—I lay in bed for five whole weeks, and—and was off my head, and said odd and wicked things that you would not have expected me to say—that dreadful bed! shall I ever forget it?”

“We will not go to the Lakes,” I say, decisively, “and we will not talk any more about mesmerism.”

“That is right,” she says, with a sigh of relief. “I try to think about it as little as possible; but sometimes, in the dead black of the night, when God seems a long way off, and the devil near, it comes back to me so strongly—I feel, do not you know, as if he were there somewhere in the room, and I must get up and follow him.”

“Why should not we go abroad?” suggest I, abruptly turning the conversation.

“Why, indeed?” cries Elizabeth, recovering her gaiety, while her pretty blue eyes begin to dance. “How stupid of us not to have thought of it before; only abroad is a big word. What abroad?”

“We must be content with something short of Central Africa,” I say, gravely, “as I think our one hundred and fifty pounds would hardly take us that far.”

“Wherever we go, we must buy a dialogue book,” suggests my little bride-elect, “and I will learn some phrases before we start.”

“As for that, the Anglo-Saxon tongue takes one pretty well round the world,” reply I, with a feeling of complacent British swagger, putting my hands in my breeches pockets.

“Do you fancy the Rhine?” says Elizabeth, with a rather timid suggestion; “I know it is the fashion to run it down nowadays, and call it a cocktail river; but—but—after all it cannot be so very contemptible, or Byron could not have said such noble things about it.”

“The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine,

Whose breast of waters broadly swells

Between the banks which bear the vine,”

say I, spouting. “After all, that proves nothing, for Byron could have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“The Rhine will not do then?” says she resignedly, suppressing a sigh.

“On the contrary, it will do admirably: it is a cocktail river, and I do not care who says it is not,” reply I, with illiberal positiveness; “but everybody should be able to say so from their own experience, and not from hearsay: the Rhine let it be, by all means.”

So the Rhine it is.

II

I have got over it; we have both got over it, tolerably, creditably; but after all, it is a much severer ordeal for a man than a woman, who, with a bouquet to occupy her hands, and a veil to gently shroud her features, need merely be prettily passive. I am alluding, I need hardly say, to the religious ceremony of marriage, which I flatter myself I have gone through with a stiff sheepishness not unworthy of my country. It is a three-days-old event now, and we are getting used to belonging to one another, though Elizabeth still takes off her ring twenty times a day to admire its bright thickness; still laughs when she hears herself called “Madame.” Three days ago, we kissed all our friends, and left them to make themselves ill on our cake, and criticise our bridal behaviour, and now we are at Brussels, she and I feeling oddly, joyfully free from any chaperone. We have been mildly sight-seeing—very mildly most people would say, but we have resolved not to take our pleasure with the railway speed of Americans, or the hasty sadness of our fellow Britons. Slowly and gaily we have been taking ours. Today we have been to visit Wiertz’s pictures. Have you ever seen them, oh reader? They are known to comparatively few people, but if you have a taste for the unearthly terrible—if you wish to sup full of horrors, hasten thither. We have been peering through the appointed peep-hole at the horrible cholera picture—the man buried alive by mistake, pushing up the lid of his coffin, and stretching a ghastly face and livid hands out of his winding sheet towards you, while awful grey-blue coffins are piled around, and noisome toads and giant spiders crawl damply about. On first seeing it, I have reproached myself for bringing one of so nervous a temperament as Elizabeth to see so haunting and hideous a spectacle; but she is less impressed than I expected—less impressed than I myself am.

“He is very lucky to be able to get his lid up,” she says, with a half-laugh; “we should find it hard work to burst our brass nails, should not we? When you bury me, dear, fasten me down very slightly, in case there may be some mistake.”

And now all the long and quiet July evening we have been prowling together about the streets—Brussels is the town of towns for flâner-ing—have been flattening our noses against the shop windows, and making each other imaginary presents. Elizabeth has not confined herself to imagination, however; she has made me buy her a little bonnet with feathers—“in order to look married,” as she says, and the result is such a delicious picture of a child playing at being grown up, having practised a theft on its mother’s wardrobe, that for the last two hours I have been in a foolish ecstasy of love and laughter over her and it. We are at the Bellevue, and have a fine suite of rooms, au premier, evidently specially devoted to the English, to the gratification of whose well-known loyalty the Prince and Princess of Wales are simpering from the walls. Is there any one in the three kingdoms who knows his own face as well as he knows the faces of Albert Victor and Alexandra? The long evening has at last slid into night—night far advanced—night melting into earliest day. All Brussels is asleep. One moment ago I also was asleep, soundly as any log. What is it that has made me take this sudden, headlong plunge out of sleep into wakefulness? Who is it that is clutching at and calling upon me? What is it that is making me struggle mistily up into a sitting posture, and try to revive my sleep-numbed senses? A summer night is never wholly dark; by the half light that steals through the closed persiennes and open windows I see my wife standing beside my bed; the extremity of terror on her face, and her fingers digging themselves with painful tenacity into my arm.

“Tighter, tighter!” she is crying, wildly. “What are you thinking of? You are letting me go!”

“Good heavens!” say I, rubbing my eyes, while my muddy brain grows a trifle clearer. “What is it? What has happened? Have you had a nightmare?”

“You saw him,” she says, with a sort of sobbing breathlessness; “you know you did! You saw him as well as I.”

“I!” cry I, incredulously—“not I! Till this second I have been fast asleep. I saw nothing.”

“You did!” she cries, passionately. “You know you did. Why do you deny it? You were as frightened as I.”

“As I live,” I answer, solemnly, “I know no more than the dead what you are talking about; till you woke me by calling and catching hold of me, I was as sound asleep as the seven sleepers.”

“Is it possible that it can have been a dream?” she says, with a long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her hands. “But no—in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was here—here—on that bed, and he stood there,” pointing with her forefinger, “just there, between the foot of it and the window!”

She stops, panting.

“It is all that brute Wiertz,” say I, in a fury. “I wish I had been buried alive myself before I had been fool enough to take you to see his beastly daubs.”

“Light a candle,” she says, in the same breathless way, her teeth chattering with fright. “Let us make sure he is not hidden somewhere in the room.”

“How could he be?” say I, striking a match; “the door is locked.”

“He might have got in by the balcony,” she answers, still trembling violently.

“He would have had to have cut a very large hole in the persiennes,” say I, half mockingly. “See, they are intact, and well fastened.”

She sinks into an arm-chair, and pushes her loose soft hair from her white face.

“It was a dream then, I suppose?”

She is silent for a moment or two, while I bring her a glass of water, and throw a dressing-gown round her cold and shrinking form.

“Now tell me, my little one,” I say coaxingly, sitting down at her feet, “what it was—what you thought you saw?”

“Thought I saw!” echoes she, with indignant emphasis, sitting upright, while her eyes sparkle feverishly. “I am as certain that I saw him standing there as I am that I see that candle burning—that I see this chair—that I see you.”

“Him! but who is him?”

She falls forward on my neck, and buries her face in my shoulder.

“That—dreadful—man!” she says, while her whole body trembles.

“What dreadful man?” cry I impatiently.

She is silent.

“Who was he?”

“I do not know.”

“Did you ever see him before?”

“Oh, no—no, never! I hope to God I may never see him again!”

“What was he like?”

“Come closer to me,” she says, laying hold of my hand with her small and chilly fingers; “stay quite near me, and I will tell you,”—after a pause—“he had a nose!”

“My dear soul,” cry I, bursting out into a loud laugh in the silence of the night, “do not most people have noses? Would not he have been much more dreadful if he had had none?”

“But it was such a nose!” she says, with perfect trembling gravity.

“A bottle nose?” suggest I, still cackling.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t laugh!” she says nervously; “if you had seen his face, you would have been as little disposed to laugh as I.”

“But his nose?” return I, suppressing my merriment, “what kind of nose was it? See, I am as grave as a judge.”

“It was very prominent,” she answers, in a sort of awe-struck half-whisper, “and very sharply chiselled; the nostrils very much cut out.” A little pause. “His eyebrows were one straight black line across his face, and under them his eyes burnt like dull coals of fire, that shone and yet did not shine; they looked like dead eyes, sunken, half extinguished, and yet sinister.”

“And what did he do?” asked I, impressed, despite myself, by her passionate earnestness; “when did you first see him?”

“I was asleep,” she said—“at least, I thought so—and suddenly I opened my eyes, and he was there—there”—pointing again with trembling finger—“between the window and the bed.”

“What was he doing? Was he walking about?”

“He was standing as still as stone—I never saw any live thing so still—looking at me; he never called or beckoned, or moved a finger, but his eyes commanded me to come to him, as the eyes of the mesmeriser at Penrith did.” She stops, breathing heavily. I can hear her heart’s loud and rapid beats.

“And you?” I say, pressing her more closely to my side, and smoothing her troubled hair.

“I hated it,” she cries, excitedly; “I loathed it—abhorred it. I was ice-cold with fear and horror, but—I felt myself going to him.”

“Yes?”

“And then I shrieked out to you, and you came running, and caught fast hold of me, and held me tight at first—quite tight—but presently I felt your hold slacken—slacken—and though I longed to stay with you, though I was mad with fright, yet I felt myself pulling strongly away from you—going to him; and he—he stood there always looking—looking—and then I gave one last loud shriek, and I suppose I awoke—and it was a dream!”

“I never heard of a clearer case of nightmare,” say I, stoutly; “that vile Wiertz! I should like to see his whole Musée burnt.”

She shakes her head. “It had nothing to say to Wiertz; what it meant I do not know, but—”

“It meant nothing,” I answer, reassuringly, “except that for the future we will go and see none but good and pleasant sights, and steer clear of charnel-house fancies.”

III

Elizabeth is now in a position to decide whether the Rhine is a cocktail river or no, for she is on it, and so am I. We are sitting, with an awning over our heads, and little wooden stools under our feet. Elizabeth has a small sailor’s hat and blue ribbon on her head. The river breeze has blown it rather awry; has tangled her plenteous hair; has made a faint pink stain on her pale cheeks. It is some fête day, and the boat is crowded. Tables, countless camp stools, volumes of black smoke pouring from the funnel, as we steam along. “Nothing to the Caledonian Canal!” cries a burly Scotchman in leggings, speaking with loud authority, and surveying with an air of contempt the eternal vine-clad slopes, that sound so well, and look so sticky in reality. “Cannot hold a candle to it!” A rival bride and bridegroom opposite, sitting together like love-birds under an umbrella, look into each other’s eyes instead of at the Rhine scenery.

“They might as well have stayed at home, might not they?” says my wife with a little air of superiority. “Come, we are not so bad as that, are we?”

A storm comes on: hailstones beat slantwise and reach us—stone and sting us right under our awning. Everybody rushes down below, and takes the opportunity to feed ravenously. There are few actions more disgusting than eating can be made. A handsome girl close to us—her immaturity evidenced by the two long tails of black hair down her back—is thrusting her knife halfway down her throat.

“Come on deck again,” says Elizabeth, disgusted and frightened at this last sight. “The hail was much better than this!”

So we return to our camp stools, and sit alone under one mackintosh in the lashing storm, with happy hearts and empty stomachs.

“Is not this better than any luncheon?” asks Elizabeth, triumphantly, while the rain-drops hang on her long and curled lashes.

“Infinitely better,” reply I, madly struggling with the umbrella to prevent its being blown inside out, and gallantly ignoring a species of gnawing sensation at my entrails.

The squall clears off by-and-by, and we go steaming, steaming on past the unnumbered little villages by the water’s edge with church spires and pointed roofs, past the countless rocks with their little pert castles perched on the top of them, past the tall, stiff poplar rows. The church bells are ringing gaily as we go by. A nightingale is singing from a wood. The black eagle of Prussia droops on the stream behind us, swish-swish through the dull green water. A fat woman who is interested in it leans over the back of the boat and, by some happy effect of crinoline, displays to her fellow-passengers two yards of thick white cotton legs. She is, fortunately for herself, unconscious of her generosity.

The day steals on; at every stopping place more people come on. There is hardly elbow room; and, what is worse, almost everybody is drunk. Rocks, castles, villages, poplars, slide by, while the paddles churn always the water, and the evening draws greyly on. At Bingen a party of big blue Prussian soldiers, very drunk, “glorious” as Tam o’Shanter, come and establish themselves close to us. They call for Lager Beer; talk at the tip-top of their strong voices; two of them begin to spar; all seem inclined to sing. Elizabeth is frightened. We are two hours late in arriving at Biebrich. It is half an hour more before we can get ourselves and our luggage into a carriage and set off along the winding road to Wiesbaden. “The night is chilly, but not dark.” There is only a little shabby bit of a moon, but it shines as hard as it can. Elizabeth is quite worn out, her tired head droops in uneasy sleep on my shoulder. Once she wakes up with a start.

“Are you sure that it meant nothing?” she asks, looking me eagerly in my face; “do people often have such dreams?”

“Often, often,” I answer, reassuringly.

“I am always afraid of falling asleep now,” she says, trying to sit upright and keep her heavy eyes open, “for fear of seeing him standing there again. Tell me, do you think I shall? Is there any chance, any probability of it?”

“None, none!”

We reach Wiesbaden at last, and drive up to the Hôtel des Quatre Saisons. By this time it is full midnight. Two or three men are standing about the door. Morris, the maid, has got out—so have I, and I am holding out my hand to Elizabeth when I hear her give one piercing scream, and see her with ash-white face and starting eyes point with her forefinger—

“There he is!—there!—there!”

I look in the direction indicated, and just catch a glimpse of a tall figure standing half in the shadow of the night, half in the gas-light from the hotel. I have not time for more than one cursory glance, as I am interrupted by a cry from the bystanders, and turning quickly round, am just in time to catch my wife, who falls in utter insensibility into my arms. We carry her into a room on the ground floor; it is small, noisy, and hot, but it is the nearest at hand. In about an hour she re-opens her eyes. A strong shudder makes her quiver from head to foot.

“Where is he?” she says, in a terrified whisper, as her senses come slowly back. “He is somewhere about—somewhere near. I feel that he is!”

“My dearest child, there is no one here but Morris and me,” I answer soothingly. “Look for yourself. See.”

I take one of the candles and light up each corner of the room in succession.

“You saw him!” she says, in trembling hurry, sitting up and clenching her hands together. “I know you did—I pointed him out to you—you cannot say that it was a dream this time.”

“I saw two or three ordinary-looking men as we drove up,” I answer, in a commonplace, matter-of-fact tone. “I did not notice anything remarkable about any of them; you know, the fact is, darling, that you have had nothing to eat all day, nothing but a biscuit, and you are over-wrought, and fancy things.”

“Fancy!” echoes she, with strong irritation. “How you talk! Was I ever one to fancy things? I tell you that as sure as I sit here—as sure as you stand there—I saw him—him—the man I saw in my dream, if it was a dream. There was not a hair’s breadth of difference between them—and he was looking at me—looking—”

She breaks off into hysterical sobbing.

“My dear child!” say I, thoroughly alarmed, and yet half angry. “For God’s sake do not work yourself up into a fever: wait till tomorrow, and we will find out who he is, and all about him; you yourself will laugh when we discover that he is some harmless bagman.”

“Why not now?” she says, nervously; “why cannot you find out now—this minute?”

“Impossible! Everybody is in bed! Wait till tomorrow, and all will be cleared up.”

The morrow comes, and I go about the hotel, inquiring. The house is so full, and the data I have to go upon are so small, that for some time I have great difficulty in making it understood to whom I am alluding. At length one waiter seems to comprehend.

“A tall and dark gentleman, with a pronounced and very peculiar nose? Yes; there has been such a one, certainly, in the hotel, but he left at grand matin this morning; he remained only one night.”

“And his name?”

The garçon shakes his head. “That is unknown, monsieur; he did not inscribe it in the visitors’ book.”

“What countryman was he?”

Another shake of the head. “He spoke German, but with a foreign accent.”

“Whither did he go?”

That also is unknown. Nor can I arrive at any more facts about him.

IV

A fortnight has passed; we have been hither and thither; now we are at Lucerne. Peopled with better inhabitants, Lucerne might well do for Heaven. It is drawing towards eventide, and Elizabeth and I are sitting hand in hand on a quiet bench, under the shady linden trees, on a high hill up above the lake. There is nobody to see us, so we sit peaceably hand in hand. Up by the still and solemn monastery we came, with its small and narrow windows, calculated to hinder the holy fathers from promenading curious eyes on the world, the flesh, and the devil, tripping past them in blue gauze veils: below us grass and green trees, houses with high-pitched roofs, little dormer-windows, and shutters yet greener than the grass; below us the lake in its rippleless peace, calm, quiet, motionless as Bethesda’s pool before the coming of the troubling angel.

“I said it was too good to last,” say I, doggedly, “did not I, only yesterday? Perfect peace, perfect sympathy, perfect freedom from nagging worries—when did such a state of things last more than two days?”

Elizabeth’s eyes are idly fixed on a little steamer, with a stripe of red along its side, and a tiny puff of smoke from its funnel, gliding along and cutting a narrow white track on Lucerne’s sleepy surface.

“This is the fifth false alarm of the gout having gone to his stomach within the last two years,” continue I resentfully. “I declare to Heaven, that if it has not really gone there this time, I’ll cut the whole concern.”

Let no one cast up their eyes in horror, imagining that it is my father to whom I am thus alluding; it is only a great-uncle by marriage, in consideration of whose wealth and vague promises I have dawdled professionless through twenty-eight years of my life.

“You must not go,” says Elizabeth, giving my hand an imploring squeeze. “The man in the Bible said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come’; why should it be a less valid excuse nowadays?”

“If I recollect rightly, it was considered rather a poor one even then,” reply I, dryly.

Elizabeth is unable to contradict this; she therefore only lifts two pouted lips (Monsieur Taine objects to the redness of English women’s mouths, but I do not) to be kissed, and says, “Stay.” I am good enough to comply with her unspoken request, though I remain firm with regard to her spoken one.

“My dearest child,” I say, with an air of worldly experience and superior wisdom, “kisses are very good things—in fact, there are few better—but one cannot live upon them.”

“Let us try,” she says coaxingly.

“I wonder which would get tired first?” I say, laughing. But she only goes on pleading, “Stay, stay.”

“How can I stay?” I cry impatiently; “you talk as if I wanted to go! Do you think it is any pleasanter to me to leave you than to you to be left? But you know his disposition, his rancorous resentment of fancied neglects. For the sake of two days’ indulgence, must I throw away what will keep us in ease and plenty to the end of our days?”

“I do not care for plenty,” she says, with a little petulant gesture. “I do not see that rich people are any happier than poor ones. Look at the St. Clairs; they have £40,000 a year, and she is a miserable woman, perfectly miserable, because her face gets red after dinner.”

“There will be no fear of our faces getting red after dinner,” say I, grimly, “for we shall have no dinner for them to get red after.”

A pause. My eyes stray away to the mountains. Pilatus on the right, with his jagged peak and slender snow-chains about his harsh neck; hill after hill rising silent, eternal, like guardian spirits standing hand in hand around their child, the lake. As I look, suddenly they have all flushed, as at some noblest thought, and over all their sullen faces streams an ineffable rosy joy—a solemn and wonderful effulgence, such as Israel saw reflected from the features of the Eternal in their prophet’s transfigured eyes. The unutterable peace and stainless beauty of earth and sky seem to lie softly on my soul. “Would God I could stay! Would God all life could be like this!” I say, devoutly, and the aspiration has the reverent earnestness of a prayer.

“Why do you say, ‘Would God!’” she cries passionately, “when it lies with yourself? Oh my dear love,” gently sliding her hand through my arm, and lifting wetly beseeching eyes to my face, “I do not know why I insist upon it so much—I cannot tell you myself—I dare say I seem selfish and unreasonable—but I feel as if your going now would be the end of all things—as if—” She breaks off suddenly.

“My child,” say I, thoroughly distressed, but still determined to have my own way, “you talk as if I were going for ever and a day; in a week, at the outside, I shall be back, and then you will thank me for the very thing for which you now think me so hard and disobliging.”

“Shall I?” she answers, mournfully. “Well, I hope so.”

“You will not be alone, either; you will have Morris.”

“Yes.”

“And every day you will write me a long letter, telling me every single thing that you do, say, and think.”

“Yes.”

She answers me gently and obediently; but I can see that she is still utterly unreconciled to the idea of my absence.

“What is it that you are afraid of?” I ask, becoming rather irritated. “What do you suppose will happen to you?”

She does not answer; only a large tear falls on my hand, which she hastily wipes away with her pocket handkerchief, as if afraid of exciting my wrath.

“Can you give me any good reason why I should stay?” I ask, dictatorially.

“None—none—only—stay—stay!”

But I am resolved not to stay. Early the next morning I set off.

V

This time it is not a false alarm; this time it really has gone to his stomach, and, declining to be dislodged thence, kills him. My return is therefore retarded until after the funeral and the reading of the will. The latter is so satisfactory, and my time is so fully occupied with a multiplicity of attendant business, that I have no leisure to regret the delay. I write to Elizabeth, but receive no letters from her. This surprises and makes me rather angry, but does not alarm me. “If she had been ill, if anything had happened, Morris would have written. She never was great at writing, poor little soul. What dear little babyish notes she used to send me during our engagement! Perhaps she wishes to punish me for my disobedience to her wishes. Well, now she will see who was in the right.”

I am drawing near her now; I am walking up from the railway station in Lucerne. I am very joyful as I march along under an umbrella, in the grand broad shining of the summer afternoon. I think with pensive passion of the last glimpse I had of my beloved—her small and wistful face looking out from among the thick fair fleece of her long hair—winking away her tears and blowing kisses to me. It is a new sensation to me to have anyone looking tearfully wistful over my departure. I draw near the great glaring Schweizerhof, with its colonnaded tourist-crowded porch; here are all the pomegranates as I left them, in their green tubs, with their scarlet blossoms, and the dusty oleanders in a row. I look up at our windows; nobody is looking out from them; they are open, and the curtains are alternatively swelled out and drawn in by the softly-playful wind.

I run quickly upstairs and burst noisily into the sitting-room. Empty, perfectly empty! I open the adjoining door into the bedroom, crying, “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” but I receive no answer. Empty too. A feeling of indignation creeps over me as I think, “Knowing the time of my return, she might have managed to be indoors.” I have returned to the silent sitting-room, where the only noise is the wind still playing hide-and-seek with the curtains. As I look vacantly round my eye catches sight of a letter lying on the table. I pick it up mechanically and look at the address. Good heavens! what can this mean? It is my own, that I sent her two days ago, unopened, with the seal unbroken. Does she carry her resentment so far as not even to open my letters? I spring at the bell and violently ring it. It is answered by the waiter who has always specially attended us.

“Is madame gone out?”

The man opens his mouth and stares at me.

“Madame! Is monsieur then not aware that madame is no longer at the hotel?”

“What?”

“On the same day as monsieur, madame departed.”

“Departed! Good God! what are you talking about?”

“A few hours after monsieur’s departure—I will not be positive as to the exact time, but it must have been between one and two o’clock as the midday table-d’hôte was in progress—a gentleman came and asked for madame—”

“Yes—be quick.”

“I demanded whether I should take up his card, but he said no, that was unnecessary, as he was perfectly well known to madame; and, in fact, a short time afterwards, without saying anything to anyone, she departed with him.”

“And did not return in the evening?”

“No, monsieur; madame has not returned since that day.”

I clench my hands in an agony of rage and grief. “So this is it! With that pure child-face, with that divine ignorance—only three weeks married—this is the trick she has played me!” I am recalled to myself by a compassionate suggestion from the garçon.

“Perhaps it was the brother of madame.”

Elizabeth has no brother, but the remark brings back to me the necessity of self-command. “Very probably,” I answer, speaking with infinite difficulty. “What sort of looking gentleman was he?”

“He was a very tall and dark gentleman with a most peculiar nose—not quite like any nose that I ever saw before—and most singular eyes. Never have I seen a gentleman who at all resembled him.”

I sink into a chair, while a cold shudder creeps over me as I think of my poor child’s dream—of her fainting fit at Wiesbaden—of her unconquerable dread of and aversion from my departure. And this happened twelve days ago! I catch up my hat, and prepare to rush like a madman in pursuit.

“How did they go?” I ask incoherently; “by train?—driving?—walking?”

“They went in a carriage.”

“What direction did they take? Whither did they go?”

He shakes his head. “It is not known.”

“It must be known,” I cry, driven to frenzy by every second’s delay. “Of course the driver could tell; where is he?—where can I find him?”

“He did not belong to Lucerne, neither did the carriage; the gentleman brought them with him.”

“But madame’s maid,” say I, a gleam of hope flashing across my mind; “did she go with her?”

“No, monsieur, she is still here; she was as much surprised as monsieur at madame’s departure.”

“Send her at once,” I cry eagerly; but when she comes I find that she can throw no light on the matter. She weeps noisily and says many irrelevant things, but I can obtain no information from her beyond the fact that she was unaware of her mistress’s departure until long after it had taken place, when, surprised at not being rung for at the usual time, she had gone to her room and found it empty, and on inquiring in the hotel, had heard of her sudden departure; that, expecting her to return at night, she had sat up waiting for her till two o’clock in the morning, but that, as I knew, she had not returned, neither had anything since been heard of her.

Not all my inquiries, not all my cross-questionings of the whole staff of the hotel, of the visitors, of the railway officials, of nearly all the inhabitants of Lucerne and its environs, procure me a jot more knowledge. On the next few weeks I look back as on a hellish and insane dream. I can neither eat nor sleep; I am unable to remain one moment quiet; my whole existence, my nights and my days, are spent in seeking, seeking. Everything that human despair and frenzied love can do is done by me. I advertise, I communicate with the police, I employ detectives; but that fatal twelve days’ start for ever baffles me. Only on one occasion do I obtain one tittle of information. In a village a few miles from Lucerne the peasants, on the day in question, saw a carriage driving rapidly through their little street. It was closed, but through the windows they could see the occupants—a dark gentleman, with the peculiar physiognomy which has so often been described, and on the opposite seat a lady lying apparently in a state of utter insensibility. But even this leads to nothing.

Oh, reader, these things happened twenty years ago; since then I have searched sea and land, but never have I seen my little Elizabeth again.

Behold, It Was a Dream!

(1868)

I

Yesterday morning I received the following letter:

Weston House,
Caulfield, ———shire.

My dear Dinah,—You must come: I scorn all your excuses, and see through their flimsiness. I have no doubt that you are much better amused in Dublin, frolicking round ballrooms with a succession of horse-soldiers, and watching her Majesty’s household troops play Polo in the Phoenix Park, but no matter—you must come. We have no particular inducements to hold out. We lead an exclusively bucolic, cow-milking, pig-fattening, roast-mutton-eating and to-bed-at-ten-o’clock-going life; but no matter—you must come. I want you to see how happy two dull elderly people may be, with no special brightness in their lot to make them so. My old man—he is surprisingly ugly at the first glance, but grows upon one afterwards—sends you his respects, and bids me say that he will meet you at any station on any day at any hour of the day or night. If you succeed in evading our persistence this time, you will be a cleverer woman than I take you for.

Ever yours affectionately,

Jane Watson.

August 15th.

P.S.—We will invite our little scarlet-headed curate to dinner to meet you, so as to soften your fall from the society of the Plungers.

This is my answer:

My dear Jane,—Kill the fat calf in all haste, and put the bake meats into the oven, for I will come. Do not, however, imagine that I am moved thereunto by the prospect of the bright-headed curate. Believe me, my dear, I am as yet at a distance of ten long good years from an addiction to the minor clergy. If I survive the crossing of that seething, heaving, tumbling abomination, St. George’s Channel, you may expect me on Tuesday next. I have been groping for hours in “Bradshaw’s” darkness that may be felt, and I have arrived at length at this twilight result, that I may arrive at your station at 6.55 p.m. But the ways of “Bradshaw” are not our ways, and I may either rush violently past or never attain it. If I do, and if on my arrival I see some rustic vehicle, guided by a startlingly ugly gentleman, awaiting me, I shall know from your wifely description that it is your “old man.” Till Tuesday, then.

Affectionately yours,

Dinah Bellairs.

August 17th.

I am as good as my word; on Tuesday I set off. For four mortal hours and a half I am disastrously, hideously, diabolically sick. For four hours and a half I curse the day on which I was born, the day on which Jane Watson was born, the day on which her old man was born, and lastly—but oh! not, not leastly—the day and the dock on which and in which the Leinster’s plunging, curtseying, throbbing body was born. On arriving at Holyhead, feeling convinced from my sensations that, as the French say, I touch my last hour, I indistinctly request to be allowed to stay on board and die, then and there; but as the stewardess and my maid take a different view of my situation, and insist upon forcing my cloak and bonnet on my dying body and limp head, I at length succeed in staggering on deck and off the accursed boat. I am then well shaken up for two or three hours in the Irish mail, and after crawling along a slow by-line for two or three hours more, am at length, at 6.55, landed, battered, tired, dust-blacked and qualmish, at the little roadside station of Caulfield. My maid and I are the only passengers who descend. The train snorts its slow way onwards, and I am left gazing at the calm crimson death of the August sun, and smelling the sweet peas in the station-master’s garden border. I look round in search of Jane’s promised tax-cart, and steel my nerves for the contemplation of her old man’s unlovely features. But the only vehicle which I see is a tiny two-wheeled pony carriage, drawn by a small and tub-shaped bay pony and driven by a lady in a hat, whose face is turned expectantly towards me. I go up and recognise my friend, whom I have not seen for two years—not since before she fell in with her old man and espoused him.

“I thought it safest, after all, to come myself,” she says with a bright laugh. “My old man looked so handsome this morning, that I thought you would never recognise him from my description. Get in, dear, and let us trot home as quickly as we can.”

I comply, and for the next half hour sit (while the cool evening wind is blowing the dust off my hot and jaded face) stealing amazed glances at my companion’s cheery features. Cheery! That is the very last word that, excepting in an ironical sense, any one would have applied to my friend Jane two years ago. Two years ago, Jane was thirty-five, the elderly eldest daughter of a large family, hustled into obscurity, jostled, shelved, by half a dozen younger, fresher sisters; an elderly girl addicted to lachrymose verse about the gone and the dead and the for-ever-lost. Apparently the gone has come back, the dead resuscitated, the for-ever-lost been found again. The peaky sour virgin is transformed into a gracious matron with a kindly, comely face, pleasure-making and pleasure-feeling. Oh, Happiness, what powder, or paste, or milk of roses, can make old cheeks young again in the cunning way that you do? If you would but bide steadily with us we might live for ever, always young and always handsome.

My musings on Jane’s metamorphosis, combined with a tired headache, make me somewhat silent, and indeed there is mostly a slackness of conversation between the two dearest allies on first meeting after absence—a sort of hesitating shiver before plunging into the sea of talk that both know to lie in readiness for them.

“Have you got your harvest in yet?” I ask, more for the sake of not utterly holding my tongue than from any profound interest in the subject, as we jog briskly along between the yellow cornfields, where the dry bound sheaves are standing in golden rows in the red sunset light.

“Not yet,” answers Jane; “we have only just begun to cut some of it. However, thank God, the weather looks as settled as possible; there is not a streak of watery lilac in the west.”

My headache is almost gone and I am beginning to think kindly of dinner—a subject from which all day until now my mind has hastily turned with a sensation of hideous inward revolt—by the time that the fat pony pulls up before the old-world dark porch of a modest little house, which has bashfully hidden its original face under a veil of crowded clematis flowers and stalwart ivy. Set as in a picture-frame by the large drooped ivy-leaves, I see a tall and moderately hard-featured gentleman of middle age, perhaps, of the two, rather inclining towards elderly, smiling at us a little shyly.

“This is my old man,” cries Jane, stepping gaily out, and giving him a friendly introductory pat on the shoulder. “Old man, this is Dinah.”

Having thus been made known to each other, we shake hands, but neither of us can arrive at anything pretty to say. Then I follow Jane into her little house, the little house for which she has so happily exchanged her tenth part of the large and noisy paternal mansion. It is an old house, and everything about it has the moderate shabbiness of old age and long and careful wear. Little thick-walled rooms, dark and cool, with flowers and flower scents lying in wait for you everywhere—a silent, fragrant, childless house. To me, who have had oily locomotives snorting and racing through my head all day, its dumb sweetness seems like heaven.

“And now that we have secured you, we do not mean to let you go in a hurry,” says Jane hospitably that night at bedtime, lighting the candles on my dressing-table.

“You are determined to make my mouth water, I see,” say I, interrupting a yawn to laugh. “Lone, lorn me, who have neither old man, nor dear little house, nor any prospect of ultimately attaining either.”

“But if you honestly are not bored, you will stay with us a good bit?” she says, laying her hand with kind entreaty on my sleeve. “St. George’s Channel is not lightly to be faced again.”

“Perhaps I shall stay until you are obliged to go away yourselves to get rid of me,” return I, smiling. “Such things have happened. Yes, without joking, I will stay a month. Then, by the end of a month, if you have not found me out thoroughly, I think I may pass among men for a more amiable woman than I have ever yet had the reputation of.”

A quarter of an hour later I am laying down my head among soft and snow-white pillows, and saying to myself that this delicious sensation of utter drowsy repose, of soft darkness and odorous quiet, is cheaply purchased even by the ridiculous anguish which my own sufferings and—hardly less than my own sufferings—the demoniac sights and sounds afforded by my fellow passengers, caused me on board the accursed Leinster—

“Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark.”

II

“Well, I cannot say that you look much rested,” says Jane next morning, coming in to greet me, smiling and fresh—(yes, sceptic of eighteen, even a woman of thirty-seven may look fresh in a print gown on an August morning, when she has a well of lasting quiet happiness inside her)—coming in with a bunch of creamy gloire de Dijons in her hand for the breakfast table. “You look infinitely more fagged than you did when I left you last night!”

“Do I?” say I rather faintly.

“I am afraid you did not sleep much?” suggests Jane, a little crestfallen at the insult to her feather beds implied by my wakefulness. “Some people never can sleep the first night in a strange bed, and I stupidly forgot to ask whether you liked the feather bed or mattress at the top.”

“Yes, I did sleep,” I answer gloomily. “I wish to heaven I had not.”

“Wish—to—heaven—you—had—not?” repeats Jane slowly, with a slight astonished pause between each word. “My dear child, for what other purpose did you go to bed?”

“I—I—had bad dreams,” say I, shuddering a little and then taking her hand, roses and all, in mine. “Dear Jane, do not think me quite run mad, but—but—have you got a ‘Bradshaw’ in the house?”

“A ‘Bradshaw?’ What on earth do you want with ‘Bradshaw?’” says my hostess, her face lengthening considerably and a slight tincture of natural coldness coming into her tone.

“I know it seems rude—insultingly rude,” say I, still holding her hand and speaking almost lachrymosely; “but do you know, my dear, I really am afraid that—that—I shall have to leave you—to-day?”

“To leave us?” repeats she, withdrawing her hand and growing angrily red. “What! when not twenty-four hours ago you settled to stay a month with us? What have we done between then and now to disgust you with us?”

“Nothing—nothing,” cry I eagerly; “how can you suggest such a thing? I never had a kinder welcome nor ever saw a place that charmed me more; but—but—”

“But what?” asks June, her colour subsiding and looking a little mollified.

“It is best to tell the truth, I suppose,” say I sighing, “even though I know that you will laugh at me—will call me vapourish—sottishly superstitious; but I had an awful and hideous dream last night.”

“Is that all?” she says, looking relieved, and beginning to arrange her roses in an old china bowl. “And do you think that all dreams are confined to this house? I never heard before of their affecting any one special place more than another. Perhaps no sooner are you back in Dublin, in your own room and your own bed, than you will have a still worse and uglier one.”

I shake my head. “But it was about this house—about you.”

“About me?” she says, with an accent of a little aroused interest.

“About you and your husband,” I answer earnestly. “Shall I tell it you? Whether you say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ I must. Perhaps it came as a warning; such things have happened. Yes, say what you will, I cannot believe that any vision so consistent—so tangibly real and utterly free from the jumbled incongruities and unlikelinesses of ordinary dreams—could have meant nothing. Shall I begin?”

“By all means,” answers Mrs. Watson, sitting down in an arm-chair and smiling easily. “I am quite prepared to listen—and disbelieve.”

“You know,” say I, narratively, coming and standing close before her, “how utterly tired out I was when you left me last night. I could hardly answer your questions for yawning. I do not think that I was ten minutes in getting into bed, and it seemed like heaven when I laid my head down on the pillow. I felt as if I should sleep till the Day of Judgment. Well, you know, when one is asleep one has of course no measure of time, and I have no idea what hour it was really; but at some time, in the blackest and darkest of the night, I seemed to wake. It appeared as if a noise had woke me—a noise which at first neither frightened nor surprised me in the least, but which seemed quite natural, and which I accounted for in the muddled drowsy way in which one does account for things when half asleep. But as I gradually grew to fuller consciousness I found out, with a cold shudder, that the noise I heard was not one that belonged to the night; nothing that one could lay on wind in the chimney, or mice behind the wainscot, or ill-fitting boards. It was a sound of muffled struggling, and once I heard a sort of choked strangled cry. I sat up in bed, perfectly numbed with fright, and for a moment could hear nothing for the singing of the blood in my head and the loud battering of my heart against my side. Then I thought that if it were anything bad—if I were going to be murdered—I had at least rather be in the light than the dark, and see in what sort of shape my fate was coming, so I slid out of bed and threw my dressing-gown over my shoulders. I had stupidly forgotten, in my weariness over night, to put the matches by the bedside, and could not for the life of me recollect where they were. Also, my knowledge of the geography of the room was so small that in the utter blackness, without even the palest, greyest ray from the window to help me, I was by no means sure in which direction the door lay. I can feel now the pain of the blow I gave this right side against the sharp corner of the table in passing; I was quite surprised this morning not to find the mark of a bruise there. At last, in my groping I came upon the handle and turned the key in the lock. It gave a little squeak, and again I stopped for a moment, overcome by ungovernable fear. Then I silently opened the door and looked out. You know that your door is exactly opposite mine. By the line of red light underneath it, I could see that at all events some one was awake and astir within, for the light was brighter than that given by a night-light. By the broader band of red light on the right side of it I could also perceive that the door was ajar. I stood stock still and listened. The two sounds of struggling and chokedly crying had both ceased. All the noise that remained was that as of some person quietly moving about on unbooted feet. ‘Perhaps Jane’s dog Smut is ill and she is sitting up with it; she was saying last night, I remember, that she was afraid it was beginning with the distemper. Perhaps either she or her old man have been taken with some trifling temporary sickness. Perhaps the noise of crying out that I certainly heard was one of them fighting with a nightmare.’ Trying, by such like suggestions, to hearten myself up, I stole across the passage and peeped in—”

I pause in my narrative.

“Well?” says Jane, a little impatiently.

She has dropped her flowers. They lie in odorous dewy confusion in her lap. She is listening rather eagerly. I cover my face with my hands. “Oh! My dear,” I cry, “I do not think I can go on. It was too dreadful! Now that I am telling it I seem to be doing and hearing it over again—”

“I do not call it very kind to keep me on the rack,” she says, with a rather forced laugh. “Probably I am imagining something much worse than the reality. For heaven’s sake speak up! What did you see?”

I take hold of her hand and continue. “You know that in your room the bed exactly faces the door. Well, when I looked in, looked in with eyes blinking at first, and dazzled by the long darkness they had been in, it seemed to me as if that bed were only one horrible sheet of crimson; but as my sight grew clearer I saw what it was that caused that frightful impression of universal red—” Again I pause with a gasp and feeling of oppressed breathing.

“Go on! go on!” cries my companion, leaning forward, and speaking with some petulance. “Are you never going to get to the point?”

“Jane,” say I solemnly, “do not laugh at me, nor pooh-pooh me, for it is God’s truth—as clearly and vividly as I see you now, strong, flourishing, and alive, so clearly, so vividly, with no more of dream haziness nor of contradiction in details than there is in the view I now have of this room and of you—I saw you both—you and your husband, lying dead—murdered—drowned in your own blood!”

“What, both of us?” she says, trying to laugh, but her healthy cheek has rather paled.

“Both of you,” I answer, with growing excitement. “You, Jane, had evidently been the one first attacked—taken off in your sleep—for you were lying just as you would have lain in slumber, only that across your throat from there to there” (touching first one ear and then the other), “there was a huge and yawning gash.”

“Pleasant,” replies she, with a slight shiver.

“I never saw any one dead,” continue I earnestly, “never until last night. I had not the faintest idea how dead people looked, even people who died quietly, nor has any picture ever given me at all a clear conception of death’s dread look. How then could I have imagined the hideous contraction and distortion of feature, the staring starting open eyes—glazed yet agonised—the tightly clenched teeth that go to make up the picture, that is now, this very minute standing out in ugly vividness before my mind’s eye?” I stop, but she does not avail herself of the pause to make any remark, neither does she look any longer at all laughingly inclined.

“And yet,” continue I, with a voice shaken by emotion, “it was you, very you, not partly you and partly some one else, as is mostly the case in dreams, but as much you, as the you I am touching now” laying my finger on her arm as I speak.

“And my old man, Robin,” says poor Jane, rather tearfully, after a moment’s silence, “what about him? Did you see him? Was he dead too?”

“It was evidently he whom I had heard struggling and crying,” I answer with a strong shudder, which I cannot keep down, “for it was clear that he had fought for his life. He was lying half on the bed and half on the floor, and one clenched hand was grasping a great piece of the sheet; he was lying head downwards, as if, after his last struggle, he had fallen forwards. All his grey hair was reddened and stained, and I could see that the rift in his throat was as deep as that in yours.”

“I wish you would stop,” cries Jane, pale as ashes, and speaking with an accent of unwilling, terror; “you are making me quite sick!”

“I must finish,” I answer earnestly, “since it has come in time, I am sure it has come for some purpose. Listen to me till the end; it is very near.” She does not speak, and I take her silence for assent. “I was staring at you both in a stony way,” I go on, “feeling—if I felt at all—that I was turning idiotic with horror—standing in exactly the same spot, with my neck craned to look round the door, and my eyes unable to stir from that hideous scarlet bed, when a slight noise, as of some one cautiously stepping on the carpet, turned my stony terror into a living quivering agony. I looked and saw a man with his back towards me walking across the room from the bed to the dressing-table. He was dressed in the dirty fustian of an ordinary workman, and in his hand he held a red wet sickle. When he reached the dressing-table he laid it down on the floor beside him, and began to collect all the rings, open the cases of the bracelets, and hurry the trinkets of all sorts into his pockets. While he was thus busy I caught a full view of the reflection of the face in the glass—” I stop for breath, my heart is panting almost as hardly as it seemed to pant during the awful moments I am describing.

“What was he like—what was he like?” cries Jane, greatly excited. “Did you see him distinctly enough to recollect his features again? Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“Should I know my own face if I saw it in the glass?” I ask scornfully. “I see every line of it now more clearly than I do yours, though that is before my eyes, and the other only before my memory—”

“Well, what was he like?—be quick, for heaven’s sake.”

“The first moment that I caught sight of him,” continue I, speaking quickly, “I felt certain that he was Irish; to no other nationality could such a type of face have belonged. His wild rough hair fell down over his forehead, reaching his shagged and overhanging brows. He had the wide grinning slit of a mouth—the long nose, the cunningly twinkling eyes—that one so often sees, in combination with a shambling gait and ragged tail-coat, at the railway stations or in the harvest fields at this time of year.” A pause. “I do not know how it came to me,” I go on presently; “but I felt as convinced as if I had been told—as if I had known it for a positive fact—that he was one of your own labourers—one of your own harvest men. Have you any Irishmen working for you?”

“Of course we have,” answers Jane, rather sharply, “but that proves nothing. Do not they, as you observed just now, come over in droves at this time of year for the harvest?”

“I am sorry,” say I, sighing. “I wish you had not. Well, let me finish; I have just done—I had been holding the door-handle mechanically in my hand; I suppose I pulled it unconsciously towards me, for the door hinge creaked a little, but quite audibly. To my unspeakable horror the man turned round and saw me. Good God! he would cut my throat too with that red, red reaping hook! I tried to get into the passage and lock the door, but the key was on the inside. I tried to scream, I tried to run; but voice and legs disobeyed me. The bed and room and man began to dance before me; a black earthquake seemed to swallow me up, and I suppose I fell down in a swoon. When I awoke really the blessed morning had come, and a robin was singing outside my window on an apple bough. There—you have it all, and now let me look for a ‘Bradshaw,’ for I am so frightened and unhinged that go I must.”

III

“I must own that it has taken away appetite,” I say, with rather a sickly smile, as we sit round the breakfast table. “I assure you that I mean no insult to your fresh eggs and bread-and-butter, but I simply cannot eat.”

“It certainly was an exceptionally dreadful dream,” says Jane, whose colour has returned, and who is a good deal fortified and reassured by the influences of breakfast and of her husband’s scepticism; for a condensed and shortened version of my dream has been told to him, and he has easily laughed it to scorn. “Exceptionally dreadful, chiefly from its extreme consistency and precision of detail. But still, you know, dear, one has had hideous dreams oneself times out of mind and they never came, to anything. I remember once I dreamt that all my teeth came out in my mouth at once—double ones and all; but that was ten years ago, and they still keep their situations, nor did I about that time lose any friend, which they say such a dream is a sign of.”

“You say that some unaccountable instinct told you that the hero of your dream was one of my own men,” says Robin, turning towards me with a covert smile of benevolent contempt for my superstitiousness; “did not I understand you to say so?”

“Yes,” reply I, not in the least shaken by his hardly-veiled disbelief. “I do not know how it came to me, but I was as much persuaded of that, and am so still, as I am of my own identity.”

“I will tell you of a plan then to prove the truth of your vision,” returns he, smiling. “I will take you through the fields this morning and you shall see all my men at work, both the ordinary staff and the harvest casuals, Irish and all. If amongst them you find the counterpart of Jane’s and my murderer” (a smile) “I will promise then—no, not even then can I promise to believe you, for there is such a family likeness between all Irishmen, at all events between all the Irishmen that one sees out of Ireland.”

“Take me,” I say eagerly, jumping up; “now, this minute! You cannot be more anxious nor half so anxious to prove me a false prophet as I am to be proved one.”

“I am quite at your service,” he answers, “as soon as you please. Jenny, get your hat and come too.”

“And if we do not find him,” says Jane, smiling playfully— “I think I am growing pretty easy on that head—you will promise to eat a great deal of luncheon and never mention ‘Bradshaw’ again?”

“I promise,” reply I gravely. “And if, on the other hand, we do find him, you will promise to put no more obstacles in the way of my going, but will let me depart in peace without taking any offence thereat?”

“It is a bargain,” she says gaily. “Witness, Robin.”

So we set off in the bright dewiness of the morning; on our walk over Robin’s farm. It is a grand harvest day, and the whitened sheaves are everywhere, drying, drying in the genial sun. We have been walking for an hour and both Jane and I are rather tired. The sun beats with all his late-summer strength on our heads and takes the force and spring out of our hot limbs.

“The hour of triumph is approaching,” says Robin, with a quiet smile, as we draw near an open gate through which a loaded wain, shedding, ripe wheat ears from its abundance as it crawls along, is passing. “And time for it too; it is a quarter past twelve and you have been on your legs for fully an hour. Miss Bellairs, you must make haste and find the murderer, for there is only one more field to do it in.”

“Is not there?” I cry eagerly. “Oh, I am glad! Thank God, I begin to breathe again.”

We pass through the open gate and begin to tread across the stubble, for almost the last load has gone.

“We must get nearer the hedge,” says Robin, “or you will not see their faces; they are all at dinner.”

We do as he suggests. In the shadow of the hedge we walk close in front of the row of heated labourers, who, sitting or lying on the hedge bank, are eating unattractive looking dinners. I scan one face after another—honest bovine English faces. I have seen a hundred thousand faces like each one of the faces now before me—very like but the exact counterpart of none. We are getting to the end of the row, I beginning to feel rather ashamed, though infinitely relieved, and to smile at my own expense. I look again, and my heart suddenly stands still and turns to stone within me. He is there!—not a hands-breadth from me! Great God! how well I have remembered his face, even to the unsightly smallpox seams, the shagged locks, the grinning slit mouth, the little sly base eyes. He is employed in no murderous occupation now; he is harmlessly cutting hunks of coarse bread and fat cold bacon with a clasp knife; but yet I have no more doubt that it is he—he whom I saw with the crimsoned sickle in his stained hand—than I have that it is I who am stonily, shiveringly, staring at him.

“Well, Miss Bellairs, who was right?” asks Robin’s cheery voice at my elbow. “Perish Bradshaw and all his labyrinths! Are you satisfied now? Good heavens!” (catching a sudden sight of my face) “How white you are! Do you mean to say that you have found him at last? Impossible!”

“Yes, I have found him,” I answer in a low and unsteady tone. “I knew I should. Look, there he is!—close to us, the third from the end.”

I turn away my head, unable to bear the hideous recollections and associations that the sight of the man calls up, and I suppose that they both look.

“Are you sure that you are not letting your imagination carry you away?” asks he presently, in a tone of gentle kindly remonstrance. “As I said before, these fellows are all so much alike, they have all the same look of debased squalid cunning. Oblige me by looking once again, so as to be quite sure.”

I obey. Reluctantly I look at him once again. Apparently becoming aware that he is the object of our notice, he lifts his small dull eyes and looks back at me. It is the same face—they are the same eyes that turned from the plundered dressing-table to catch sight of me last night. “There is no mistake,” I answer, shuddering from head to foot. “Take me away, please—as quick as you can—out of the field—home!”

They comply, and over the hot fields and through the hot noon air we step silently homewards. As we reach the cool and ivied porch of the house I speak for the first time. “You believe me now?”

He hesitates. “I was staggered for a moment, I will own,” he answers, with candid gravity; “but I have been thinking it over and on reflection I have come to the conclusion that the highly excited state of your imagination is answerable for the heightening of the resemblance which exists between all the Irish of that class into an identity with the particular Irishman you dreamed of, and whose face (by your own showing) you only saw dimly reflected in the glass.”

“Not dimly,” repeat I, emphatically, “unless I now see that Sun dimly” (pointing to him as he gloriously, blindingly, blazes from the sky). “You will not be warned by me, then?” I continue passionately, after an interval. “You will run the risk of my dream coming true—you will stay on here in spite of it? Oh, if I could persuade you to go from home—anywhere—anywhere—for a time, until the danger was past!”

“And leave the harvest to itself?” answers he, with a smile of quiet sarcasm; “be a loser of two hundred or three hundred pounds, probably, and a laughing-stock to my acquaintance into the bargain, and all for—what? A dream—a fancy—a nightmare!”

“But do you know anything of the man?—of his antecedents?—of his character?” I persist eagerly.

He shrugs he shoulders.

“Nothing whatever; nothing to his disadvantage, certainly. He came over with a lot of others a fortnight ago, and I engaged him for the harvesting. For anything I have heard to the contrary, he is a simple inoffensive fellow enough.”

I am silenced, but not convinced. I turn to Jane. “You remember your promise: you will now put no more hindrances in the way of my going?”

“You do not mean to say that you are going, really?” says Jane, who is looking rather awed by what she calls the surprising coincidence but is still a good deal heartened up by her husband’s want of faith.

“I do,” reply I, emphatically. “I should go stark staring mad if I were to sleep another night in that room. I shall go to Chester to-night, and cross to-morrow from Holyhead.”

I do as I say. I make my maid, to her extreme surprise, repack my just unpacked wardrobe and take an afternoon train to Chester. As I drive away with bag and baggage down the leafy lane, I look back and see my two friends standing at their gate. Jane is leaning her head on her old man’s shoulder, and looking rather wistfully after me: an expression of mingled regret for my departure and vexation at my folly clouding their kind and happy faces. At least my last living recollection of them is a pleasant one.

IV

The joy with which my family welcome my return is largely mingled with surprise, but still more largely with curiosity, as to the cause of my so sudden reappearance. But I keep my own counsel. I have a reluctance to give the real reason, and possess no inventive faculty in the way of lying, so I give none. I say, “I am back: is not that enough for you? Set your minds at rest, for that is as much as you will ever know about the matter.”

For one thing, I am occasionally rather ashamed of my conduct. It is not that the impression produced by my dream is effaced, but that absence and distance from the scene and the persons of it have produced their natural weakening effect. Once or twice during the voyage, when writhing in laughable torments in the ladies’ cabin of the steam-boat, I said to myself, “Most likely you are a fool!” I therefore continually ward off the cross-questionings of my family with what defensive armour of silence and evasion I may.

“I feel convinced it was the husband,” says one of my sisters, after a long catechism, which, as usual, has resulted in nothing. “You are too loyal to your friend to own it, but I always felt sure that any man who could take compassion on that poor peevish old Jane must be some wonderful freak of nature. Come, confess. Is not he a cross between an orang-outang and a Methodist parson?”

“He is nothing of the kind,” reply I, in some heat, recalling the libelled Robin’s clean fresh-coloured human face. “You will be very lucky if you ever secure any one half so kind, pleasant, and gentleman-like.”

Three days after my return, I receive a letter from Jane:

Weston House, Caulfield.

My Dear Dinah,—I hope you are safe home again, and that you have made up your mind that two crossings of St. George’s Channel within forty-eight hours are almost as bad as having your throat cut, according to the programme you laid out for us. I have good news for you. Our murderer elect is gone. After hearing of the connection that there was to lie between us, Robin naturally was rather interested in him, and found out his name, which is the melodious one of Watty Doolan After asking his name he asked other things about him, and finding that he never did a stroke of work and was inclined to be tipsy and quarrelsome he paid and packed him off at once. He is now on his way back to his native shores, and if he murder anybody it will be you, my dear. Good-bye, Dinah. Hardly yet have I forgiven you for the way in which you frightened me with your graphic description of poor Robin and me, with our heads loose and waggling.

Ever yours affectionately.

Jane Watson.

I fold up this note with a feeling of exceeding relief, and a thorough faith that I have been a superstitious hysterical fool. More resolved than ever am I to keep the reason for my return profoundly secret from my family. The next morning but one we are all in the breakfast-room after breakfast, hanging about, and looking at the papers. My sister has just thrown down the Times, with a pettish exclamation that there is nothing in it and that it really is not worthwhile paying threepence a day to see nothing but advertisements and police reports. I pick it up as she throws it down, and look listlessly over its tall columns from top to bottom. Suddenly my listlessness vanishes. What is this that I am reading?—this in staring capitals?

“SHOCKING TRAGEDY AT CAULFIELD.
DOUBLE MURDER.”

I am in the middle of the paragraph before I realise what it is.

“From an early hour of the morning this village has been the scene of deep and painful excitement in consequence of the discovery of the atrocious murder of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, of Weston House, two of its most respected inhabitants. It appears that the deceased had retired to rest on Tuesday night at their usual hour, and in their usual health and spirits. The housemaid, on going to call them at the accustomed hour on Wednesday morning, received no answer, in spite of repeated knocking. She therefore at length opened the door and entered. The rest of the servants, attracted by her cries, rushed to the spot, and found the unfortunate gentleman and lady lying on the bed with their throats cut from ear to ear. Life must have been extinct for some hours, as they were both perfectly cold. The room presented a hideous spectacle, being literally swimming in blood. A reaping hook, evidently the instrument with which the crime was perpetrated, was picked up near the door. An Irish labourer of the name of Watty Doolan, discharged by the lamented gentleman a few days ago on account of misconduct, has already been arrested on strong suspicion, as at an early hour on Wednesday morning he was seen by a farm labourer, who was going to his work, washing his waistcoat at a retired spot in the stream which flows through the meadows below the scene of the murder. On being apprehended and searched, several small articles of jewellery, identified as having belonged to Mr. Watson, were discovered in his possession.”

I drop the paper and sink into a chair, feeling deadly sick.

So you see that my dream came true, after all.

The facts narrated in the above story occurred in Ireland. The only liberty I have taken with them is in transplanting them to England.

Poor Pretty Bobby

(1872)

“Yes, my dear, you may not believe me, but I can assure you that you cannot dislike old women more, nor think them more contemptible supernumeraries, than I did when I was your age.”

This is what old Mrs. Hamilton says—the old lady so incredibly tenacious of life (incredibly as it seems to me at eighteen) as to have buried a husband and five strong sons, and yet still to eat her dinner with hearty relish, and laugh at any such jokes as are spoken loudly enough to reach her dulled ears. This is what she says, shaking the while her bead, which—poor old soul—is already shaking a good deal involuntarily. I am sitting close beside her arm-chair, and have been reading aloud to her; but as I cannot succeed in pitching my voice so as to make her hear satisfactorily, by mutual consent the book has been dropped in my lap, and we have betaken ourselves to conversation.

“I never said I disliked old women, did I?” reply I evasively, being too truthful altogether to deny the soft impeachment “What makes you think I do? They are infinitely preferable to old men; I do distinctly dislike them.”

“A fat, bald, deaf old woman,” continues she, not heeding me, and speaking with slow emphasis, while she raises one trembling hand to mark each unpleasant adjective; “if, in the year 1802, anyone had told me that I should have lived to be that, I think I should have killed them or myself! and yet now I am all three.”

“You are not very deaf,” say I politely—the fatness and baldness admit of no civilities consistent with veracity—but I raise my voice to pay the compliment

“In the year 1802, I was seventeen,” she says, wandering off into memory. “Yes, my dear, I am just fifteen years older than the century, and it is getting into its dotage, is not it? The year 1802—ah! that was just about the time that I first saw my poor Bobby! Poor pretty Bobby.”

“And who was Bobby?” ask I, pricking up my ears, and scenting, with the keen nose of youth, a dead-love idyll; an idyll of which this poor old hill of unsteady flesh was the heroine.

“I must have told you the tale a hundred times, have not I?” she asks, turning her old dim eyes towards me. “A curious tale, say what you will, and explain it how you will. I think I must have told you; but indeed I forget to whom I tell my old stories and to whom I do not Well, my love, you must promise to stop me if you have heard it before, but to me, you know, these old things are so much clearer than the things of yesterday.”

“You never told me, Mrs. Hamilton,” I say, and say truthfully; for being a new acquaintance, I really have not been made acquainted with Bobby’s history. “Would you mind telling it me now, if you are sure that it would not bore you?”

“Bobby,” she repeats softly to herself, “Bobby. I dare say you do not think it a very pretty name?”

“N-not particularly,” I reply honestly. “To tell you the truth, it rather reminds me of a policeman.”

“I dare say,” she answers quietly; “and yet in the year I grew to think it the handsomest, dearest name on earth. Well, if you like, I will begin at the beginning and tell you how that came about.”

“Do,” say I, drawing a stocking out of my pocket, and thriftily beginning to knit to assist me in the process of listening.

•    •    •    •

In the year 1802 we were at war with France—you know that, of course. It seemed then as if war were our normal state; I could hardly remember a time when Europe had been at peace. In these days of stagnant quiet it appears as if people’s kith and kin always lived out their full time and died in their beds. Then there was hardly a house where there was not one dead, either in battle, or of his wounds after battle, or of some dysentery or ugly parching fever. As for us, we had always been a soldier family—always; there was not one of us that had ever worn a black gown or sat upon a high stool with a pen behind his ear. I had lost uncles and cousins by the half-dozen and dozen, but, for my part, I did not much mind, as I knew very little about them, and black was more becoming wear to a person with my bright colour than anything else.

(At the mention of her bright colour I unintentionally lift my eyes from my knitting, and contemplate the yellow bagginess of the poor old cheek nearest me. Oh, Time! Time! what absurd and dirty turns you play us! What do you do with all our fair and goodly things when you have stolen them from us? In what far and hidden treasure-house do you store them?)

But I did care very much—very exceedingly—for my dear old father—not so old either—younger than my eldest boy was when he went, he would have been forty-two if he had lived three days longer. Well, well, child, you must not let me wander, you must keep me to it. He was not a soldier, was not my father; he was a sailor, a post-captain in His Majesty’s navy, and commanded the ship Thunderer in the Channel fleet.

I had struck seventeen in the year 1802, as I said before, and had just come home from being finished at a boarding school of repute in those days, where I had learnt to talk the prettiest ancien régime French, and to hate Bonaparte with unchristian violence, from a little ruined émigré marichale had also, with infinite expenditure of time, labour, and Berlin wool, wrought out Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, and Jacob’s First Kiss to Rachel in finest cross-stitch. Now I had bidden adieu to learning; had only resolved never to disinter Télémaque and Thomson’s Seasons from the bottom of my trunk; had taken a holiday from all my accomplishments, with the exception of cross-stitch, to which I still faithfully adhered—and, indeed, on the day I am going to mention, I recollect that I was hard at work on Judas Iscariot’s face in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper—hard at work at it, sitting in the morning sunshine, on a straight-backed chair. We had flatter backs in those days; our shoulders were not made round by lolling in easy-chairs; indeed, no then upholsterer made a chair that it was possible to loll in. My father rented a house near Plymouth at that time, an in-and-out nooky kind of old house—no doubt it has fallen to pieces long years ago—a house all set round with unnumbered flowers, and about which the rooks clamoured all together from the windy elm tops. I was labouring in flesh-coloured wool on Judas’s left cheek, when the door opened and my mother entered. She looked as if something had freshly pleased her, and her eyes were smiling. In her hand she held an open and evidently just-read letter.

“A messenger has come from Plymouth,” she says, advancing quickly and joyfully towards me. “Your father will be here this afternoon.”

“This afternoon!” cry I, at the top of my voice, pushing away my heavy work-frame. “How delightful! But how—how can that happen?”

“They have had a brush with a French privateer,” she answers, sitting down on another straight-backed chair, and looking again over the large square letter, destitute of envelope, for such things were not in those days, “and then they succeeded in taking her. Yet they were a good deal knocked about in the process, and have had to put into Plymouth to rest; so he will be here this afternoon for a few hours.”

“Hurrah!” cry I, rising, holding out my scanty skirts, and beginning to dance.

“Bobby Gerard is coming with him,” continues my mother, again glancing at her despatch.

“Poor boy, he has had a shot through his right arm, which has broken the bone! So your father is bringing him here for us to nurse him well again.”

I stop in my dancing.

“Hurrah again!” I say brutally. “I do not mean about his arm; of course, I am very sorry for that; but, at all events, I shall see him at last I shall see whether he is like his picture, and whether it is not as egregiously flattered as I have always suspected.”

There was no photographs, you know, in those days—not even hazy daguerreotypes—it was fifty good years too soon for them. The picture to which I allude is a miniature, at which I had stolen many a deeply longing admiring glance in its velvet case. It is almost impossible for a miniature not to flatter. To the most coarse-skinned and mealy-potato-faced people it cannot help giving cheeks of the texture of a rose-leaf, and brows of the grain of finest marble.

“Yes,” replies my mother, absently, “so you will. Well, I must be going to give orders about his room. He would like one looking on the garden best, do not you think Phoebe?—one where he could smell the flowers and hear the birds?”

Mother goes, and I fall into a meditation. Bobby Gerard is an orphan. A few years ago his mother, who was an old friend of my father’s—who knows! perhaps an old love—feeling her end drawing nigh, had sent for father, and had asked him, with eager dying tears, to take as much care of her pretty forlorn boy as he could, and to shield him a little in his tender years from the evils of this wicked world, and to be to him a wise and kindly guardian, in the place of those natural ones that God had taken. And father had promised, and when he promised there was small fear of his not keeping his word.

This was some years ago, and yet I had never seen him nor he me; he had been almost always at sea and I at school. I had heard plenty about him—about his sayings, his waggeries, his mischievousness, his softheartedness, and his great and unusual comeliness; but his outward man, save as represented in that stealthily peeped-at miniature, had I never seen. They were to arrive in the afternoon; but long before the hour at which they were due I was waiting, with expectant impatience to receive them.

I had changed my dress, and had (though rather ashamed of myself) put on everything of most becoming that my wardrobe afforded. If you were to see me as I stood before the glass on that summer afternoon, you would not be able to contain your laughter; the little boys in the street would run after me throwing stones and hooting, but then— according to the then fashion and standard of gentility—I was all that was most elegant and comme il faut. Lately it has been the mode to puff one’s self out with unnatural and improbable protuberances; then one’s great life-object was to make one’s self appear as scrimping as possible—to make one’s self look as if one had been ironed. Many people damped their clothes to make them stick more closely to them, and to make them define more distinctly the outline of form and limbs. One’s waist was under one’s arms; the sole object of which seemed to be to outrage nature by pushing one’s bust up into one’s chin, and one’s legs were revealed through one’s scanty drapery with startling candour as one walked or sat I remember once standing with my back to a bright fire in our long drawing-room, and seeing myself reflected in a big mirror at the other end. I was so thinly clad that I was transparent, and could see through myself. Well, in the afternoon in question I was dressed quite an hour and a half too soon. I had a narrow little white gown, which clung successfully tight and close to my figure, and which was of so moderate a length as to leave visible my ankles and my neatly-shod and cross-sandalled feet I had long mittens on my aims, black, and embroidered on the backs in coloured silks; and above my hair, which at the back was scratched up to the top of my crown, towered a tremendous tortoise-shell comb; while on each side of my face modestly dropped a bunch of curls, nearly meeting over my nose.

My figure was full—ah! my dear, I have always had a tendency to fat, and you see what it has come to—and my pink cheeks were more deeply brightly rosy than usual. I had looked out at every upper window, so as to have the furthest possible view of the road.

I had walked in my thin shoes halfway down the drive, so as to command a turn, which, from the house, impeded my vision, when, at last, after many tantalising false alarms, and just five minutes later than the time mentioned in the letter, the high-swung, yellow-bodied, post-chaise hove in sight, dragged—briskly jingling—along by a pair of galloping horses. Then, suddenly, shyness overcame me—much as I loved my father, it was more as my personification of all knightly and noble qualities than from much personal acquaintance with him—and I fled.

I remained in my room until I thought I had given them ample time to get through the first greetings and settle down into quiet talk. Then, having for one last time run my fingers through each ringlet of my two curl bunches, I stole diffidently downstairs.

There was a noise of loud and gay voices issuing from the parlour, but, as I entered, they all stopped talking and turned to look at me.

“And so this is Phoebe!” cries my father’s jovial voice, as he comes towards me, and heartily kisses me. “Good Lord, how time flies! It does not seem more than three months since I saw the child, and yet then she was a bit of a brat in trousers, and long bare legs!”

At this allusion to my late mode of attire, I laugh, but I also feel myself growing scarlet

“Here, Bobby!” continues my father, taking me by the hand, and leading me towards a sofa on which a young man is sitting beside my mother; “this is my little lass that you have so often heard of. Not such a very little one, after all, is she? Do not be shy, my boy; you will not see such a pretty girl every day of your life—give her a kiss.”

My eyes are on the ground, but I am aware that the young man rises, advances (not unwillingly, as it seems to me), and bestows a kiss somewhere or other on my face. I am not quite clear where, as I think the curls impede him a good deal.

Thus, before ever I saw Bobby, before ever I knew what manner of man he was, I was kissed by him. That was a good beginning, was not it?

After these salutations are over, we subside again into conversation—I sitting beside my father, with his arm round my waist, sitting modestly silent, and peeping every now and then under my eyes, as often as I think I may do so safely unobserved, at the young fellow opposite me. I am instituting an inward comparison between nature and art: between the real live man and the miniature that undertakes to represent him. The first result of this inspection is disappointment, for where are the lovely smooth roses and lilies that I have been wont to connect with Bobby Gerard’s name? There are no roses in his cheek, certainly; they are paleish—from his wound, as I conjecture; but even before that accident, if there were roses at all, they must have been mahogany-coloured ones, for the salt sea winds and the high summer sun have tanned his fair face to a rich reddish, brownish, copperish hue. But in some things the picture lied not There is the brow more broad than high; the straight fine nose; the brave and joyful blue eyes, and the mouth with its pretty curling smile. On the whole, perhaps, I am not disappointed.

By-and-by father rises, and steps out into the verandah, where the canary birds hung out in their cages are noisily praising God after their manner. Mother follows him. I should like to do the same; but a sense of good manners, and a conjecture that possibly my parents may have some subjects to discuss, on which they would prefer to be without the help of my advice, restrain me.

I therefore remain, and so does the invalid.

II

For some moments the silence threatens to remain unbroken between us; for some moments the subdued sound of father’s and mother’s talk from among the rosebeds and the piercing clamour of the canaries—fishwives among birds—are the only noises that salute our ears. Noise we make none ourselves. My eyes are reading the muddled pattern of the Turkey carpet, I do not know what his are doing. Small knowledge have I had of men, saving the dancing master at our school; a beautiful new youth is almost as great a novelty to me as to Miranda, and I am a good deal gawkier than she was under the new experience. I think he must have made a vow that he would not speak first I feel myself swelling to double my normal size with confusion and heat; at last, in desperation, I look up, and say sententiously, “You have been wounded, I believe?”

“Yes, I have.”

He might have helped me by answering more at large, might not he?

But now that I am having a good look at him, I see that he is rather red too. Perhaps he also feels gawky and swollen; the idea encourages me.

“Did it hurt very badly?”

“N—not so very much.”

“I should have thought that you ought to have been in bed,” say I, with a motherly air of solicitude.

“Should you, why?”

“I thought that when people broke their limbs they had to stay in bed till they were mended again.”

“But mine was broken a week ago,” he answers, smiling and showing his straight white teeth—ah the miniature was silent about them! “You would not have had me stay in bed a whole week, like an old woman?”

“I expected to have seen you much iller,” said I, beginning to feel more at my ease, and with a sensible diminution of that unpleasant swelling sensation. “Father said in his note that we were to nurse you well again; that sounded as if you were quite ill.”

“Your father always takes a great deal too much care of me,” he says, with a slight frown and darkening of his whole bright face. “It might be sugar or salt”

“And very kind of him, too,” I cry, firing up. “What motive beside your own good can he have for looking after you? I call you rather ungrateful.”

“Do you?” he says calmly, and without apparent resentment “But you are mistaken. I am not ungrateful. However, naturally, you do not understand.”

“Oh, indeed!” reply I, speaking rather shortly, and feeling a little offended, “I dare say not”

Our talk is taking a somewhat hostile tone; to what further amenities we might have proceeded is unknown; for at this point father and mother reappear through the window, and the necessity of conversing with each other at all ceases.

Father stayed till evening, and we all supped together, and I was called upon to sit by Bobby, and cut up his food for him, as he was disabled from doing it for himself. Then, later still, when the sun had set, and all his evening reds and purples had followed him, when the night flowers were scenting all the garden, and the shadows lay about, enormously long in the summer moonlight, father got into the post-chaise again, and drove away through the black shadows and the faint clear shin; and Bobby stood at the hail door watching him, with his arm in a sling and a wistful smile on lips and eyes.

“Well, we are not left quite desolate this time,” says mother, turning with rather tearful laughter to the young man. “You wish that we were, do not you, Bobby?”

“You would not believe me, if I answered ‘No,’ would you?” he asks, with the same still smile.

“He is not very polite to us, is he, Phoebe?”

“You would not wish me to be polite in such a case,” he replies, flushing. “You would not wish me to be glad at missing the chance of seeing any of the fun?”

But Mr. Gerard’s eagerness to be back at his post delays the probability of his being able to return thither. The next day he has a feverish attack, the day after he is worse; the day after that worse still, and in fine, it is between a fortnight and three weeks before he also is able to get into a post-chaise and drive away to Plymouth. And meanwhile mother and I nurse him and cosset him, and make hum odd and cool drinks out of herbs and field flowers, whose uses are now disdained or forgotten. I do not mean any offence to you, my dear, but I think that young girls in those days were less squeamish and more truly delicate than they are nowadays. I remember once I read Humphrey Clinker aloud to my father, and we both highly relished and laughed over its jokes; but I should not have understood one of the darkly unclean allusions in that French book your mother left here one day. You would think it very unseemly to enter the bedroom of a strange young man, sick or well; but as for me, I spent whole nights in Bobby’s, watching him and tending him with as little false shame as if he had been my brother. I can hear now, more plainly than the song you sang me an hour ago, the slumberous buzzing of the great brown coated summer bees in his still room, as I sat by his bedside watching his sleeping face, as he dreamt unquietly, and clenched, and again unclenched, his nervous hands. I think he was back in the Thunderer. I can see now the little close curls of his sunshiny hair straggling over the white pillow.

And then there came a good and blessed day, when he was out of danger, and then another, a little further on, when he was up and dressed, and he and I walked forth into the hayfield beyond the garden—reversing the order of things— he, leaning on my arm; and a good plump solid arm it was. We walked out under the heavy leaved horse chestnut trees, and the old and rough barked elms. The sun was shining all this time, as it seems to me. I do not believe that in those days there were the same cold unseasonable rains as now; there were soft showers enough to keep the grass green and the flowers undrooped, but I have no association of overcast skies and untimely deluges with those long and azure days. We sat under a haycock, on the shady side, and indolently watched the hot haymakers—the shirt-sleeved men, and burnt and bare armed women, tossing and raking while we breathed the blessed country air, full of adorable scents, and crowded with little happy and pretty winged insects.

“In three days,” says Bobby, leaning his elbow in the hay, and speaking with an eager smile, “three days at the furthest, I may go back again, may not I, Phoebe?”

“Without doubt,” reply I, stiffly, pulling a dry and faded ox-eye flower out of the odorous mounds beside me; “for my part, I do not see why you should not go tomorrow, or indeed—if we could send into Plymouth for a chaise—this afternoon; you are so thin that you look all mouth and eyes, and you can hardly stand, without assistance, but these, of course, are trifling drawbacks, and I dare say would be rather an advantage on board ship than otherwise.”

“You are angry!” he says, with a sort of laugh in his deep eyes. “You look even prettier when you are angry than when you are pleased.”

“It is no question of my looks,” I say, still in some heat, though mollified by the irrelevant compliment.

“For the second time you are thinking me ungrateful,” he says, gravely “you do not tell me so in so many words, because it is towards yourself that my ingratitude is shown. The first time you told me of it, it was almost the first thing that you ever said to me.”

“So it was,” I answer quickly-, “and if the occasion were to come over again, I should say it again. I dare say you did not mean it, but it sounded exactly as if you were complaining of my father for being too careful of you.”

“He is too careful of me!” cries the young man, with a hot flushing of cheek and brow. “I cannot help if it makes you angry again; I must say it, he is more careful of me than he would be of his own son, if he had one.”

“Did he not promise your mother that he would look after you?” ask I, eagerly. “When people make promises to people on their death beds, they are in no hurry to break them; at least such people as father are not.”

“You do not understand,” he says, a little impatiently, while that hot flush still dwells on his pale cheek. “My mother was the last person in the world to wish him to take care of my body at the expense of my honour.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, looking at him, with a lurking suspicion that, despite the steady light of reason in his blue eyes, he is still labouring under some form of delirium.

“Unless I tell you all my grievance, I see that you will never comprehend,” he says, sighing.

“Well, listen to me, and you shall hear it; and if you do not agree with me when I have done, you are not the kind of girl I take you for.”

“Then I am sure I am not the kind of girl you take me for,” reply I, with a laugh, “for I am fully determined to disagree with you entirely.”

“You know,” he says, raising himself a little from his hay couch, and speaking with clear rapidity, “that, whenever we take a French prize a lot of the French sailors are ironed, and the vessel is sent into port, in the charge of one officer and several men. There is some slight risk attending it—for my part, I think very slight—but I suppose that your father looks at it differently, for— I have never been sent.”

“It is accident,” say I, reassuringly. “Your turn will come in good time.”

“It is not an accident!” he answers firmly. “Boys younger than I am—much less trustworthy, and of whom he has not half the opinion that he has of me—have been sent; but I, never. I bore it as well as I could for a long time, but now I can bear it no longer, it is not, I assure you, my fancy; but I can see that my brother officers, knowing how partial your father is to me—what influences I have with him in many things—conclude that my not being sent is my own choice; in short, that I am— afraid.” (His voice sinks with a disgusted and shamed intonation at the last word) “Now—I have told you the sober facts—look me in the face” (putting his hand, with boyish familiarity, under my chin, and, turning round my curls, my features, and the front view of my big comb towards him), “and tell me whether you agree with me, as I said you would, or not—whether it is not cruel kindness on his part to make me keep a whole skin on such terms?”

I look him in the face for a moment, trying to say that I do not agree with him, but it is more than I can manage.

“You were right,” I say, turning my head away. “I do agree with you; I wish to heaven that I could honestly say that I did not.”

“Since you do, then,” he cries excitedly—“Phoebe! I knew you would; I knew you better than you know yourself—I have a favour to ask of you, a great favour, and one that will keep me all my life in debt to you.”

“What is it?” ask I, with sinking heart.

“Your father is very fond of you—”

“I know it,” I answer curtly.

“Anything that you asked, and that was within the bounds of possibility, he would do,” he continues, with eager gravity. “Well, this is what I ask of you: to write him a line, and let me take it when I go, asking him to send me home in the next prize.”

“And if,” say I, with a trembling voice, “you lost your life in this service, you will have to thank me for it; I shall have your death on my head all through my life.”

“The danger is infinitesimal, as I told you before,” he says, impatiently; “and even if it were greater than it is—well, life is a good thing, very good, but there are better things; and even if I come to grief, which is most unlikely, there are plenty of men as good as—better than—I, to step into my place.”

“It will be small consolation to the people who are fond of you that someone better than you is alive, though you are dead,” I say, tearfully.

“But I do not mean to be dead,” he says, with a cheery laugh. “Why are you so determined on killing me? I mean to live to be an admiral. Why should I not?”

“Why indeed?” say I, with a feeble echo of his cheerful mirth, and feeling rather ashamed of my tears.

“And meanwhile you will write?” he says with an eager return to the charge; “and soon? Do not look angry and pouting, as you did just now, but I must go! What is there to hinder me? I am getting up my strength as fast as it is possible for any human creature to do, and just think how I should feel if they were to come in for something really good while I am away.”

So I wrote.

III

I often wished afterwards that my right hand had been cut off before its fingers had held the pen that wrote that letter. You wonder to see me moved at what happened so long ago—before your parents were born—and certainly it makes not much difference now; for even if he had prospered then, and come happily home to me, yet, in the course of nature he would have gone long before now. I should not have been so cruel as to have wished him to have lasted to be as I am. I did not mean to hint at the end of my story before I have reached the middle.

Well—and so he went, with the letter in his pocket, and I felt something like the king in the tale, who sent a messenger with a letter, and wrote in the letter, “Slay the bearer of this as soon as he arrives!” But before he went—the evening before, as we walked in the garden after supper, with our monstrously long shadows stretching before us in the moonlight—I do not think he said in so many words, “Will you marry me?” but somehow, by some signs or words on both our parts, it became clear to us that, by-and-by, if God left him alive, and if the war ever came to an end, he and I should belong to one another. And so, having understood this, when he went he kissed me, as he had done when he came, only this time no one bade him; he did it of his own accord, and a hundred times instead of one; and for my part, this time, instead of standing passive like a log or a post, I kissed him back again, most lovingly.

Ah! parting in those days, when the last kiss to one’s beloved ones was not unlikely to be an adieu until the great Day of Judgment, was a different thing to the listless, unemotional goodbyes of these stagnant times of peace!

And so Bobby also got into a post-chaise and drove away, and we watched him too, till he turned the corner out of our sight, as we had watched father, and then I hid my face among the jessamine flowers that clothed the wall of the house, and wept as one that would not be comforted. However, one cannot weep for ever, or, if one does, it makes one blind and blear, and I did not wish Bobby to have a wife with such defects; so in process of time I dried my tears.

And the days passed by, and nature went slowly and evenly through her lovely changes. The hay was gathered in, and the fine new grass and clover sprang up among the stalks of the grass that had gone; and the wild roses struggled into odorous bloom, and crowned the hedges, and then their time came, and they shook down their faint petals, and went.

And now the corn harvest had come, and we had heard once or twice from our beloveds, but not often. And the sun still shone with broad power, and kept the rain in subjection. And all morning I sat at my big frame, and toiled on the Last Supper. I had finished Judas Iscariot’s face and the other Apostles. I was engaged now upon the table-cloth, which was not interesting and required not much exercise of thought. And mother sat near me, either working too or reading a good book, and taking snuff—every lady snuffed in those days: at least in trifles, if not in great things, the world mends. And at night, when ten o’clock struck, I covered up my frame and stole listlessly upstairs to my room. There, I knelt at the open window, facing Plymouth and the sea, and asked God to take good care of father and Bobby. I do not know that I asked for any spiritual blessings for them, I only begged that they might be alive.

One night, one hot night, having prayed even more heartily and tearfully than my wont for them both, I had lain down to sleep. The windows were left open, and the blinds up, that all possible air might reach me from the still and scented garden below. Thinking of Bobby, I had fallen asleep, and he is still mistily in my head, when I seem to wake.

The room is full of clear light, but it is not morning: it is only the moon looking right in and flooding every object I can see my own ghostly figure sitting up in bed, reflected in the looking-glass opposite. I listen: surely I heard some noise: yes—certainly, there can be no doubt of it—someone is knocking loudly and perseveringly at the hall-door. At first I fall into a deadly fear; then my reason comes to my aid. If it were a robber, or person with any evil intent, would he knock so openly and clamorously as to arouse the inmates? Would not he rather go stealthily to work, to force a silent entrance for himself? At worst it is some drunken sailor from Plymouth; at best it is a messenger with news of our dear ones At this thought I instantly spring out of bed, and hurrying on my stockings and shoes and whatever garments come most quickly to hand—with my hair spread all over my back, and utterly forgetful of my big comb, I open my door, and fly down the passages, into which the moon is looking with her ghostly smile, and down the broad and shallow stairs.

As I near the ball-door I meet our old butler also rather dishevelled, and evidently on the same errand as myself.

“Who can it be, Stephens?” I ask, trembling with excitement and fear.

“Indeed, ma’am, I cannot tell you,” replies the old man, shaking his bead, “it is a very odd time of night to choose for making such a noise. We will ask them their business, whoever they are, before we unchain the door.”

It seems to me as if the endless bolts would never be drawn—the key never be turned in the stiff lock; but at last the door opens slowly and cautiously, only to the width of a few inches, as it is still confined by the strong chain. I peep out eagerly, expecting I know not what

Good heavens! What do I see? No drunken sailor, no messenger, but, oh joy! oh blessedness! my Bobby himself—my beautiful boy-lover! Even now, even after all these weary years, even after the long bitterness that followed, I cannot forget the unutterable happiness of that moment

“Open the door, Stephens, quick!” I cry, stammering with eagerness.

“Draw the chain; it is Mr. Gerard; do not keep him waiting.”

The chain rattles down, the door opens wide and there he stands before me. At once, ere anyone has said anything, ere anything has happened, a feeling of cold disappointment steals unaccountably over me—a nameless sensation, whose nearest kin is chilly awe. He makes no movement towards me; he does not catch me in his arms, nor even hold out his right hand to me.

He stands there still and silent, and though the night is dry, equally free from rain and dew, I see that he is dripping wet; the water is running down from his clothes, from his drenched hair, and even from his eyelashes, onto the dry ground at his feet.

“What has happened?” I cry, hurriedly, “How wet you are!” and as I speak I stretch out my hand and lay it on his coat sleeve. But even as I do it a sensation of intense cold runs up my fingers and my arm, even to the elbow. How is it that he is so chilled to the marrow of his bones on this sultry, breathless, August night? To my extreme surprise he does not answer, he still stands there, dumb and dripping. “Where have you come from?” I ask, with that sense of awe deepening. “Have you fallen into the river? How is it that you are so wet?”

“It was cold,” he says, shivering, and speaking in a slow and strangely altered voice, “bitter cold. I could not stay there.”

“Stay where?” I say, looking in amazement at his face, which, whether owing to the ghastly effect of moonlight or not, seems to me ash white. “Where have you been? What is it you are talking about?”

But he does not reply.

“He is really ill, I am afraid, Stephens,” I say, turning with a forlorn feeling towards the old butler. “He does not seem to hear what I say to him. I am afraid he has had a thorough chill. What water can he have fallen into? You had better help him up to bed, and get him warm between the blankets. His room is quite ready for him, you know—come in,” I say, stretching out my hand to him, “you will be better after a night’s rest”

He does not take my offered hand, but he follows me across the threshold and across the ball.

I hear the water drops falling drip, drip, on the echoing stone floor as he passes; then upstairs, and along the gallery to the door of his room, where I leave him with Stephens. Then everything becomes blank and nil to me.

I am awoke as usual in the morning by the entrance of my maid with hot water.

“Well, how is Mr. Gerard this morning?” I ask, springing into a sitting posture.

She puts down the hot water tin and stares at her leisure at me.

“My dear Miss Phoebe, how should I know? Please God he is in good health and safe, and that we shall have good news of him before long.”

“Have not you asked how he is?” I ask impatiently. “He did not seem quite himself last night; there was something odd about him. I was afraid he was in for another touch of fever.”

“Last night—fever,” repeats she, slowly and disconnectedly echoing some of my words. “I beg your pardon, ma’am, I am sure, but I have not the least idea in life what you are talking about”

“How stupid you are!” I say, quite at the end of my patience. “Did not Mr. Gerard come back unexpectedly last night, and did not I hear him knocking, and run down to open the door, and did not Stephens come too, and afterwards take him up to bed?”

The stare of bewilderment gives way to a laugh.

“You have been dreaming, ma’am. Of course I cannot answer for what you did last night, but I am sure that Stephens knows no more of the young gentleman than I do, for only just now, at breakfast, he was saying that he thought it was about time for us to have some tidings of him and master.”

“A dream!” cry I indignantly. “Impossible! I was no more dreaming then than I am now.”

But time convinces me that I am mistaken, and that during all the time that I thought I was standing at the open ball-door, talking to my beloved, in reality I was lying on my own bed in the depths of sleep, with no other company than the scent of the flowers and the light of the moon.

At this discovery a great and terrible depression falls on me. I go to my mother to tell her of my vision, and at the end of my narrative I say:

“Mother, I know well that Bobby is dead and that I shall never see him any more. I feel assured that he died last night, and that he came himself to tell me of his going. I am sure that there is nothing left for me but to go too.”

I speak thus far with great calmness, but when I have done I break out into loud and violent weeping. Mother rebukes me gently, telling me that there is nothing more natural than that I should dream of a person who constantly occupies my waking thoughts, nor that, considering the gloomy nature of my apprehensions about him, my dream should be of a sad and ominous kind, but that, above all dreams and omens, God is good, that He has preserved him hitherto, and that, for her part, no devil-sent apparition shall shake her confidence in His continued clemency. I go away a little comforted, though not very much, and still every night I kneel at the open window facing Plymouth and the sea, and pray for my sailor boy. But it seems to me, despite all my self-reasonings, despite all that mother says, that my prayers for him are prayers for the dead.

IV

Three more weeks pass away: the harvest is garnered, and the pears are growing soft and mellow. Mother’s and my outward life goes on in its silent regularity, nor do we talk much to each other of the tumult that rages—of the heartache that bums, within each of us. At the end of the three weeks, as we are sitting as usual, quietly employed, and buried each in our own thoughts, in the parlour, towards evening we hear wheels approaching the hall-door. We both run out as in my dream I had run to the door, and arrive in time to receive my father as he steps out of the carriage that has brought him. Well! at least one of our wanderers has come home, but where is the other?

Almost before he has heartily kissed us both—wife and child—father cries out, “But where is Bobby?”

“That is just what I was going to ask you,” replies mother quickly.

“Is not he here with you?” returns he anxiously.

“Not he,” answers mother, “we have neither seen nor heard anything of him for more than six weeks.”

“Great God!” exclaims he, while his face assumes an expression of the deepest concern,

“what can have become of him? what can have happened to the poor fellow?”

“Has not he been with you, then?—has not he been in the Thunderer?” asks mother, running her words into one another in her eagerness to get them out.

“I sent him home three weeks ago in a prize, with a letter to you, and told him to stay with you till I came home, and what can have become of him since, God only knows!” he answers with a look of the profoundest sorrow and anxiety.

There is a moment of forlorn and dreary silence; then I speak. I have been standing dumbly by, listening, and my heart growing colder and colder at every dismal word.

“It is all my doing!” I cry passionately, flinging myself down in an agony of tears on the straight-backed old settle in the ball. “It is my fault—no one else’s! The very last time that I saw him, I told him that he would have to thank me for his death, and he laughed at me, but it has come true. If I had not written you, father, that accursed letter, we should have had him here now this minute, safe and sound, standing in the middle of us—as we never, never shall have him again!”

I stop, literally suffocated with emotion.

Father comes over, and lays his kind brown hand on my bent prone head. “My child,” he says, “my dear child” (and tears are dimming the clear grey of his own eyes), “you are wrong to make up your mind to what is the worst at once. I do not disguise from you that there is cause for grave anxiety about the dear fellow, but still God is good, He has kept both him and me hitherto; into His hands we must trust our boy.”

I sit up, and shake away my tears.

“It is no use,” I say. “Why should I hope? There is no hope! I know it for a certainty. He is dead—” (looking round at them both with a sort of calmness); “he died on the night that I had that dream—mother, I told you so at the time. Oh, my Bobby! I knew that you could not leave me for ever without coming to tell me!”

And so speaking, I fall into strong hysterics and am carried upstairs to bed. And so three or four more lagging days crawl by, and still we hear nothing, and remain in the same state of doubt and uncertainty: which to me, however, is hardly uncertainty: so convinced am I, in my own mind, that my fair-haired lover is away in the land whence never letter or messenger comes—that he has reached the Great Silence. So I sit at my frame, working my heart’s agony into the tapestry, and feebly trying to say to God that He has done well, but I cannot. On the contrary, it seems to me, as my life trails on through the mellow mist of the autumn mornings, through the shortened autumn evenings, that, whoever has done it, it is most evilly done. One night we are sitting round the crackling little wood fire that one does not need for warmth, but that gives a cheerfulness to the room and the furniture, when the butler Stephens enters, and going over to father, whispers to him. I seem to understand in a moment what the purport of his whisper is.

“Why does he whisper?” I cry, irritably. “Why does not he speak out loud? Why should you try to keep it from me? I know that it is something about Bobby.”

Father has already risen, and is walking towards the door.

“I will not let you go until you tell me,” I cry wildly, flying after him.

“A sailor has come over from Plymouth,” he answers, hurriedly: “he says he has news. My darling, I will not keep you in suspense a moment longer than I can help, and meanwhile pray—both of you pray for him!”

I sit rigidly still, with my cold hands tightly clasped, during the moments that next elapse.

Then father returns. His eyes are full of tears, and there is small need to ask for his message; it is most plainly written on his features—death, and not life.

“You were right, Phoebe,” he says, brokenly, taking hold of my icy hands; “you knew best. He is gone! God has taken him.”

My heart dies. I had thought that I had no hope, but I was wrong. “I knew it!” I say, in a dry stiff voice. “Did not I tell you so? But you would not believe me—go on!—tell me how it was—do not think I cannot bear it—make haste!”

And so he tells me all that there is now left for me to know—after what manner, and on what day my darling took his leave of this pretty and cruel world. He had had his wish, as I already know, and had set off blithely home in the last prize they had captured. Father had taken the precaution of having a larger proportion than usual of the Frenchmen ironed, and had also sent a greater number of Englishmen. But to what purpose? They were nearing port, sailing prosperously along on a smooth blue sea, with a fair, strong wind, thinking of no evil, when a great and terrible misfortune overtook them. Some of the Frenchmen who were not ironed got the sailors below and drugged their grog, ironed them, and freed their countrymen. Then one of the officers rushed on deck, and holding a pistol to my Bobby’s head, bade him surrender the vessel or die. Need I tell you which he chose? I think not—well (with a sigh) and so they shot my boy—ah me! how many years ago—and threw him overboard! Yes—threw him overboard—it makes me angry and grieved even now to think of it—into the great and greedy sea, and the vessel escaped to France.

•    •    •    •

There is a silence between us: I will own to you that I am crying, but the old lady’s eyes are dry.

“Well,” she says, after a pause, with a sort of triumph in her tone, “they never could say again that Bobby Gerard was afraid!”

“The tears were running down my father’s cheeks, as he told me,” she resumes presently, “but at the end he wiped them and said, ‘It is well! He was as pleasant in God’s sight as he was in ours, and so He has taken him.’”

“And for me, I was glad that he had gone to God—none gladder. But you will not wonder that, for myself, I was, past speaking sorry. And so the years went by, and, as you know, I married Mr. Hamilton, and lived with him forty years, and was happy in the main, as happiness goes; and when he died I wept much and long, and so I did for each of my sons when in turn they went. But looking back on all my long life, the event that I think stands out most dearly from it is my dream and my boy-lover’s death-day. It was an odd dream, was it not?”

Betty’s Visions

(1883)

HER FIRST VISION

“I can see nothing unnatural about her!” says the mother, with an aggrieved accent on the adjective. “She is a remarkably nice child, if that is unnatural. Everyone says she is a remarkably nice child, everyone but you.”

“Did I say that she was not a remarkably nice child?” retorts he, nettled; “should I be likely to say that my own child was not a nice child?”

“You said that she was unnatural, what more could you have said of her if she had had two heads?”

“How you harp upon a mere word!” replies he, crossly, “if I said unnatural, I only meant that she was not like other children.”

“If, as I incline to think, since Rachel’s arrival, to be like other children means to be voracious, idle, and uncivil, I am not sorry she is unlike other children.”

Perhaps because he feels that he is getting the worst of it, Mr. Brewster declines into silence, and walking to the window, stands there, whistling subduedly, and watching the object of dispute and her cousin Rachel, both at present visible upon the lawn. But, though they are both in the same place, their occupations are dissimilar. Rachel, seated in the fork of the mulberry tree, to which she had hoydenishly climbed, is gnawing an unripe apple, rudely snatched, half-eaten, from one of the boys; while little Betty, the daughter of the house, is soberly walking over the sward beside a stout, middle-aged gentleman, one of whose hands she is quietly caressing with both hers.

“Uncommonly fond little Miss of her uncle!” resumed Mr. Brewster, presently, in a not very complacent tone; “I never heard of any child being so fond of an uncle. I am sure I was not when I was a boy. I remember one of mine giving me a precious good licking because I filled his top-boots with cold water!”

“And richly you deserved it!” retorts his wife.

“But as to Miss Betty,” continued he.

“Miss Betty is a very amiable child,” interrupts Mrs. Brewster, with a not altogether amiable accent on her daughter’s name.

“I never said she was not,” rejoins he, with a testiness born of the implied slur upon the amiability of his own infancy. “All I say is that there is something un—

“Natural,” he is going to add; but, bethinking himself in time how gravely displeasing the expression is to his wife, he pulls himself up. Perhaps she is grateful to him for his self-control. Perhaps the various little shafts she has winged at him have eased her spleen, for she says presently, in a far better humoured voice—

“She is uncommonly fond of him; of course he is a very good fellow, being your brother” (with a little malicious laugh); “how could he help being? But I confess I cannot see his attraction. I really do not know,” she adds, thoughtfully, “how I shall break to the child that he is going on Tuesday.”

“Whatever you do, do not put it off till the last moment,” says he, hastily, “or we shall be having a scene.”

“She never makes scenes,” replies Mrs. Brewster, coldly. “I wish she did; she would not feel things so deeply if she made scenes.”

“Well, as he is only going for a fortnight to Maidenhead,” returns Betty’s father, with a short laugh, “in my humble opinion it will be rather a waste of deep feeling in this case; it is like the parson who preached from the text ‘Knowing well that they should see his face no more,’ and took an affecting farewell of his congregation when he was only going by penny boat down to Margate.”

“You must remember that to a child a fortnight is as long as two years would be to old people like you and me,” replies his wife, passing by with grave contempt the dubious facetiousness of her husband’s illustration; and as she speaks she leaves the room.

The dreaded Tuesday has come. The carriage that bears away the beloved Uncle John has driven from the door. The whole family—gathered to bid him God-speed on the door-step—have again dispersed to their various avocations. Rachel, having pumped up a few noisy and unnecessary tears—tears speedily dried by half a dozen cobnuts thrust into her hand by the warmest-hearted of the boys—has gone off rabbiting with the latter, forgetful and elate; a bag of ferrets in her lily hand. Betty, who, on the contrary, has not cried at all, remains rooted to the doorstep, silent and still; her eyes fastened to the spot where the departing vehicle had last blessed her sight.

“Why, in Heaven’s name, if she is so cut up, cannot she cry?” says Mr. Brewster to his wife, as they saunter away together towards the garden. “If Rachel or the boys are in trouble, one cannot hear oneself speak for the noise of their sorrow; I do not care what you say, there is something unnat—”

The forbidden word dies half spoken on his lips.

“She will get over it,” replies the mother, throwing back a compassionate look at the disconsolate little figure still rooted to the doorstep; “she will out-grow it. I believe that I was a very odd child, and you must own”—(laughing)—“that there is nothing very odd about me now.”

Five days have passed. “July,” as Horace Walpole said, “has set in with its usual severity.” After a brief spell of tantalising sunshine, just to show what weather can and ought to be, ———shire has relapsed into its normal state of drip, drip. It has poured all day. All day the rooms have rung with the din of the bored and house-bound children. From the schoolroom have issued noisesome smells of amateur cooking; squeals as of a pinched Rachel; yells, as of retaliated-upon boys; yelps of trodden-on dogs; Bob’s voice; Bill’s voice; Geoffrey’s voice; highest, shrillest of all, Rachel’s voice. But among all the voices, there is not to be detected one tone of little Betty’s. She is not even with them; is not even playing her usual part of meek souffre douleur. All through the rainy day she has sat alone in a disused attic, often haunted by her, sat among old trunks and family pictures that have had their day, and now live with their pale faces to the wall; has sat watching those cunning mathematicians, the spiders, spin their nice webs; and the little nervous mice dart noiselessly in and out of their wainscot homes. It has grown dark now; too dark, one would think, even for the spiders to see to weave their webs, but perhaps they do not need sight. Perhaps they go on weaving, weaving all through the night.

Mrs. Brewster is sitting in her boudoir. Her husband is dining out, and she is alone. It is not an evening on which one would choose to be alone; an evening on which the wet tree boughs slap the window, and the rain comes sometimes even down the chimney; making the fire spit and fizz. It is the sort of evening on which, looking out into the straining dusk, one might expect to see a Banshee’s weird face pressed against the pane. Some such nervous thought as this has prompted Mrs. Brewster to stretch out her hand to the bell, to ring for the servant to draw the curtains, when the door noiselessly opens, and her little daughter enters.

“Betty!” cries the mother, in a cross tone, for there is something ghostly and that harmonizes with her vague fears, in the child’s soundless mode of entry, “not in bed yet? It is nine o’clock! What do you mean?”

Betty makes no answer. She has silently advanced out of the shadows that enwrap the further end of the room, into the little radius of red light diffused by the wood fire.

“What is the matter with you? Why do you not speak?” cries Mrs. Brewster, irritably. The child is beside her now, and her eyes are lifted to her mother’s; and yet the latter feels that they are somehow not looking at her, but, as it were, at some object beyond her.

“What is the matter with you?” repeats she, with growing nervous ill-humour, shaking the little girl by the shoulder.

Then Betty speaks. “Uncle John is dead!” she says, in a level, dreaming voice. “I know it; he touched me on the shoulder as he passed by.”

“What nonsense are you talking?” cries Mrs. Brewster, angrily. “How can Uncle John have touched you when he is a hundred and twenty miles away? What do you mean by telling such a silly falsehood?”

The child does not answer. She neither retracts nor re-asserts her statement. She only stands perfectly still, with that odd, unseeing look in her eyes.

“If you do not know how to behave more rationally you had better go to bed,” says the mother, displeased and frightened—she scarcely knows at what —and noiselessly and still, as if in a dream, Betty obeys.

The morning has come, and it and the sunshine it has brought with it, have dispersed and routed the eerie terrors of the night.

Sitting in her light and cheerful boudoir, Mrs. Brewster has forgotten with how creepy a feeling she had looked into its dark corner over night. She has forgotten also Betty’s strange speech, and her own ire at it. She is smiling to herself at the recollection of some little whimsical incident of his dinner party, retailed to her by her husband, when that husband enters.

“A telegram?” says she, seeing a flimsy pink paper in his hand. “From whom? No bad news, I hope?” She says it without violent emotion, all that the world holds of great importance to her being safely housed within the same walls as she.

Mr. Brewster does not answer.

“From John, I suppose?” suggests she, calmly. “He is coming back sooner than he intended.”

Then, surprised at his silence and looking up for the first time into his face—“Good heavens, what is it?”

For all answer he puts the paper into her hand, and her eye in an instant has drunk its contents. “From Mr. Smith, Skindle’s Hotel, Maidenhead. To Mr. Brewster, Taplington Grange, ———shire. Accident on the river last night. Col. Brewster drowned. Body just recovered. Come at once.”

Mrs. Brewster has turned very pale; but at such news a change of colour is not surprising.

“Last night!” she says, Betty’s speech flashing suddenly back upon her mind. “What time last night? It does not say what time.”

“What does the exact time matter?” replies he, gruffly; turning away his head with an Englishman’s unconquerable aversion from being seen, even by a wife, under the influence of any emotion. He had liked his brother; and is thinking of the time when they were little boys together.

“It does matter!” she cries, excitedly. “It does! it does!”

But he has left the room to give hasty directions relative to his departure, which immediately follows. On the next day he returns, bringing with him his brother’s body, and such details of the catastrophe that had caused that brother’s death, as are ever likely to be arrived at. Upon that ill-starred evening, the weather at Maidenhead, unlike that in ———shire, had been fine, and Colonel Brewster had, according to his frequent habit after dinner, taken a boat and sculled himself on the river. He had not returned at his usual hour, which excited some slight surprise at the hotel, but not much alarm was felt until early on the ensuing morning, when his hat was brought in by a countryman, who had found it near the bank of the river, and had also seen a skiff floating, keel uppermost, further out in the stream. Drags were immediately procured, and after half an hour’s search the body was discovered half a mile lower down the river in a bed of rushes. By what accident the boat had capsized, and its occupant, an excellent swimmer, lost his life, will probably never be known. Only the fact remains, that on the evening of his death his niece, at the distance of one hundred and twenty miles away, had become aware of its having taken place. She expressed no surprise at the news, nor ever revealed, further than by that one sentence, how she had become apprised of it. This was her First Vision.

HER SECOND VISION

Time has been galloping away. It has begun to gallop even with Betty; for she is grown up. At eighteen, time gallops, though not violently; at thirty-eight, it outstrips an express train; and at fifty-eight it leaves the electric telegraph behind it. Betty is eighteen, and full-grown. No longer is she measured, with heels together and chin tucked in, against the school-room door; since, for the last year, she has continued stationary at that final inch in the paint; which proclaims that her height is to remain at five feet five inches until, that is, the epoch, which arrives sooner than we expect it, when she will begin to grow down again. She has developed into a demure, pale comeliness; and no one any longer thinks her odd. Her father no longer considers her as unnatural; and his altercations with her mother on the subject of her (Betty’s) eccentricities have long died into silence. At eighteen, there is nothing eccentric in being indifferent to dolls, and averse from ferrets; in speaking with a soft voice, and liking rather to walk than to run, in seeking solitude, and being able to look at a loaded apple tree without any desire to swarm up it. With the good word of many, and the ill word of few, Betty takes her still course along life’s path; a little thrown into the shade, perhaps, by her cousin Rachel, who has shot up into a very fine young woman—a splendid young female athlete, whose achievements in hunting-field, or on frozen river, in ballroom, or on tennis-ground, are admired by all the countryside, and in the wake of whose glories Betty follows with distant, unenvying humility.

It is a winter evening, crisp and stilly cold, and in the once school-room now elevated and transmogrified by the aid of a clean paper and a few girlish gimcracks into a grown-up sitting-room, are the cousins. They are standing side by side at the window, having pulled back the curtain, and are looking out, as well as the hard frost-flowers on the pane will let them, at the moon-ennobled snow.

“You will have a moon!” says Betty.

“At this time to-morrow, as nearly as possible, I shall be getting there,” rejoins Rachel, with a sort of dance in her voice. “I wish they had asked you too.”

“I do not think that I do,” says Betty, reflectively; letting her finger travel slowly down the window, in the effort—a vain one, since they are on the other side of the glass—to reach the airy frost traceries. “I do not think that I enjoy things much at first hand. When you come back and describe them they sound entrancing!”

“I do not see how this visit can help being entrancing!” cries Rachel, pursuing her own joyous anticipations.

“And yet visits do help it,” answers Betty, with gentle cynicism.

“Two balls and a play! Skating if it freezes; hunting if it thaws!” continues Rachel, triumphantly; checking off on her fingers her promised pleasures. “I cannot think why they did not ask you!”

“I can,” replies Betty, with a grave smile, “since they could get the plums without the dough, they were quite wise to do so; but,” (with a change of tone to a wistful intonation) “however delightful they may be, you will come home for Christmas?”

“By the number of times you have asked me that question it is evident that you think I shall not,” answers Rachel, with a good-humoured impatience.

“There is nobody cheers up mother in the way you do,” pursues Betty, leaning her elbow on the sill and looking pensively out at the steely December stars. “If one wanted a. proof, which one does not, of what a melancholy world this is, one would have it in the fact of the extreme gratitude that people feel for mere animal spirits in anyone.”

“Mere animal spirits!” repeats Rachel, laughing lightly, “thank you for the compliment.”

“I really do not know how I shall break it to the boys if you do not come back for the Workhouse tea and the servants’ ball,” says Betty, gravely.

“But I shall! I shall! I shall!” cries the other, resolutely; “dead or alive you will see me back on Christmas Eve!” She repeats the assertion emphatically at her departure next day, leaning a radiant face out of the brougham window to blow kisses to the three grave persons assembled on the doorstep, and to bid her God-speed, as they and she had assembled to bid Uncle John God-speed some seven years ago.

“She will have a moon,” says Betty, following with her serious, youthful eyes the carriage as it rolls briskly away.

“She ought to be there in a couple of hours. It is not more than eighteen miles, and the roads are good. Gad! it is cold!” says Mr. Brewster, rubbing his hands and turning to re-enter the house, whither his wife has already preceded him, and resumed her occupation of that sofa where, from some real or imagined sickness, she now spends the major part of her life. There, some good while later, her husband finds her stretched, discomposed and fretful. Her work is disarranged; her silks are mixed; she cannot sort the colours by candle-light; Rachel always managed them for her.

“She must be nearly at Hinton now,” says Mr. Brewster, intermitting for a moment his back-warming process to glance at the clock on the chimney-piece behind him, and glad of a topic by which to divert the current of his wife’s plaints, “the roads are good, and there is a moon as big as a cart wheel. I am glad I did not let her have the young horses, as she wanted,” pursues he, in a self-congratulatory tone; “they take a great deal of driving.”

“I cannot think what I am to do without her for a whole week,” sighs Mrs. Brewster, pettishly. “Who is to tell whether this is blue or green?” sitting up and helplessly comparing two skeins of floss by the light of the shaded lamp that stands beside her couch. “Where is Betty’? She would be better than nobody. I do not know how it is,” with a distinct access of fractiousness, “but that girl always manages to be out of the way whenever one wants her.”

“Talk of the devil,” cries her father, cheerfully; “here she is.” And in effect, as he speaks, his daughter enters, and moves slowly to the fire.

“Your eyes are better than mine, Betty,” says the mother, holding out her dubious silks for her child’s inspection; then suddenly, as she lifts her look to the girl’s face, changing her tone, “what is the matter with you?” she asks, abruptly; “how odd you look!”

Betty has paused beside her mother’s sofa; and her eyes, wide open, yet unseeing as those of a somnambulist, are fixed unthinkingly upon her.

“Rachel is dead,” she says, in a distinct, level, passionless voice, as of one speaking in a dream. “I know it! She touched me on the knee as she went by.”

Mr. Brewster has dropped his coat tails, and Mrs. Brewster her silks, and both are staring open-mouthed, aghast, and dumb at their daughter. Mr. Brewster is the first to recover his speech.

“What gibberish are you talking?” cries he, roughly; putting his hand on the girl’s wrist. “Are you walking in your sleep? Wake up!”

But Betty makes no answer. She turns slowly, as one who has accomplished her errand, and walks as dreamily out of the room as she had entered it.

Mrs. Brewster has tottered up from her sofa, trembling like a leaf, and crying copiously.

“How can you pay any heed to such rubbish?” asks her husband, angrily. “The girl is hysterical. She would be all the better for having a bucket of cold water thrown over her. We have always let her have her own way too much, that is it.”

But Mrs. Brewster is sobbing violently.

“Do you not remember?” she cries. “It was just the same, she said just the same years ago, when she was a child, when John died.”

“Fiddlesticks,” says he, in a fury. “Who would have expected a woman of your sense to be so puerilely superstitious? A mere coincidence. Rachel dead! Ha! ha! She must have been pretty quick about it. Come now, think” —(laying his hand friendly and reasonably upon her trembling shoulder)— “what is likely to have happened to her in less than two hours? If she had had the young horses, I grant you, it would have been a different thing, but as it is—there, that is better. Let me get you some salvolatile, and when next I see Miss Betty I will give her a piece of my mind for upsetting you in this way.”

Mr. Brewster’s eloquence, though not of a very lofty order, is yet of sufficient force gradually to soothe his wife into comparative composure, and, when to his reasonings he has added the promise, given with a good-humoured shrug, that a servant on horseback shall be sent off first thing in the morning to inquire after Rachel’s welfare, the poor lady is so far restored to her normal state of faint and intermittent cheerfulness, that she is able to sit down to dinner with tolerable appetite. Betty does not appear; which, though neither of her parents confess it, is a relief to both. Mr. Brewster is not generally much given to table-talk. Being of a hungry and slightly epicure turn, he is of opinion that it is impossible to do two things well at once, but to-day he puts forth his powers magnanimously to amuse his wife; and the ball of talk is flying briskly from one to the other, when the butler, approaching his master, and even so far breaking through the traditions of his trade as to interrupt him in the middle of a speech, informs him in an undertone “that there is a person in the hall who wishes to speak to him.”

“Let him wish!” says Mr. Brewster, somewhat surly at having the thread of his eloquence untimely snapped. “Did not you tell him I was at dinner? He may wait.”

“If you please, sir, he says he must see you,” rejoins the butler, With respectful persistence. “I beg your pardon, sir,” (lowering his voice still further, and looking meaningly towards Mrs. Brewster, whose attention is at the moment wholly occupied by the feeding of a couple of cats) “but I think you had better see him.”

There is something so odd and emphatic in the servant’s manner. that, without offering any further objection, Mr. Brewster jumps up and hastens into the adjoining hall. There seem to be several persons in it; maid-servants whimpering with their aprons to their eyes; but the centre of interest is obviously a young man, leaning with shaking limbs and a sheet-white face, against the oak table in the middle of the hall. Instantly, Mr. Brewster has recognised him as one of the sons of the house to which his niece had gone. In a moment he is beside him.

“What is it?” he says, hoarsely. Then, as the young fellow struggles in vain for utterance, “What is it?” he repeats, shaking him by the shoulder. “In God’s name, speak out!”

Perhaps there is a bracing power in the harshness of his adjuration, for the stranger speaks.

“There—there has been an accident,” he says, indistinctly. “Your—your niece—”

“Yes?”

“She— she.”

Again he stops, looking as if he were about to faint.

“For God’s sake, go on!” says Mr. Brewster, hoarsely. “Harris, give him some brandy.”

It is not until he has swallowed it that the young man is able to proceed.

“At the corner of Hampton Lane, in a field, there was a rick on fire. The horses took fright, bolted, and upset the carriage into the ditch. Miss Brewster was thrown off.”

“Thrown off! What do you mean? Why, she was inside!”

“She was driving. She had put the men-servants inside. She and her maid were on the box. She was thrown violently against some spiked iron railings, and when she was taken up she was—”

“Dead?” asks Mr. Brewster, gripping the young man’s arm and speaking in a husky whisper. “Dead?” The attention of everyone in the room has been so wholly riveted upon the speakers, that no one has perceived the opening of the dining-room door and the appearance of a figure on the threshold, until a terrible loud hysteric laugh breaks upon their ears.

“Dead?” shrieks Mrs. Brewster. “Dead? Then it was true; then Betty was right.” And so falls heavily to the floor in a dead swoon.

HER THIRD VISION

The blow does not kill Mrs. Brewster. Her acquaintances are all agreed that it must, since for years past their and her doctor has gone about the neighbourhood proclaiming the unparalleled weakness of her heart. But apparently it is not so weak as he had imagined, since, after such a shock, it still goes on pulsing, however feebly. Weakly people, with one leg habitually planted in the grave, take a great deal of killing; but the catastrophe turns her at once into a hopeless invalid. After that day she never resumes the habits of health. But as time goes on, her valetudinarian ways assume a permanence and stability with which those about her as little connect the idea of change and death as with their own robuster modes of life. Never to appear till one o’clock in the afternoon, never to join her family at dinner, never to be seen except in a recumbent posture, never to be told anything disagreeable. These are the features of her case; features which may probably remain long after many of the healthy persons who come to visit her, and who insensibly sink and soften their voices on entering her dim and shaded room, have been carried, feet foremost, to the churchyard. It need hardly be said that no allusion either to her niece’s violent death, or her daughters strange prevision of it, is ever allowed in Mrs. Brewster’s presence. And though no doctor has prohibited the communicating of any number of disagreeable truths to Mr. Brewster, yet neither does he ever allude to the facts above referred to. To whom should he, indeed? To Betty, then?

But as to Betty, both her lips are shut in a silence as close as that of death. On being told of her cousin’s tragic end, she had expressed no more surprise than she had manifested seven years before, on hearing of the death by drowning, of her Uncle John. Not the slightest hint as to the mode in which the catastrophe had been communicated to her has ever fallen from her.

It is even a matter of doubt to her father whether any consciousness or remembrance of it remains with her. Sometimes, as he sees her seated tranquilly working or quietly reading, with as humdrum and everyday an air as it is possible for any human being to be dressed in, a poignant desire assails him to question her as to those strange and supernatural intimations, of which she has twice been the recipient. But always a sort of reluctant awe restrains him.

And meanwhile, life flows dully by in the old house. The boys are out in the world, and return but seldom to the house whence their bright playfellow has been borne to the grave. There is nothing to amuse them when they do return, since the state of Mrs. Brewster’s health precludes (or she thinks so, which comes to the same thing,) the possibility of society. Betty has quietly abandoned the world at eighteen, in order to devote herself more completely to her parents. To speak more exactly, to her parent; for Mr. Brewster is of a social turn, and would fain take his daughter into the world with him, making her an excuse for his own presence at festivities abroad and merrymakings at home. But how can he have the inhumanity to set up his coarse and brutal claims against those far more sacred ones of his moribund wife? He is fond of music; but, since Rachel’s fingers were stiffened in death, no one has dared to open the piano; the least hint of such an intention would re-plunge the sickly wife and mother into those terrible hysterics, from which it is the main end of life with her nearest kin to keep her and themselves.

And so, poor, convivial Mr. Brewster, except when someone charitably asks him out to dinner, nods through the dull evenings over his newspaper, or tries to feign an interest he is far from feeling in the game of patience which is the one excitement of his good lady’s life. In complete unconsciousness, that good lady pursues her gentle way, quietly and simply accepting the sacrifice of the two lives daily offered on her invalid altar, and, with equal simplicity, the owners of those two lives unite in the cult of sanctified selfishness embodied in the charmingly dressed, diaphanous, prostrate being who has succeeded in delicately snuffing out all the mirth of their existence. It is three years since Rachel died, or, to speak more exactly, three years and a quarter, for it was in the deepest, blackest depth of winter that she went, and now the long-stretching light, the bold crocus rows, the courting thrushes, all tell that spring has come.

Betty is twenty-one years old, for it was in the spring that she came, a spring gift blown in by the bustling March winds.

“Twenty-one! twenty-one!” she says over to herself. It seems to her a great age. She wonders Whether it strikes other people in the same light.

“Father!” she says, putting her arms about his neck as he sits running his eye rather disconsolately over the theatrical announcements in The Times, “Do you know what an elderly daughter you have got? I am twenty-one to-day!”

“Twenty-one?” repeats he, with a jump. “You do not say so. God bless my soul!”

He sighs heavily, but, trying to turn it off into a cough, cries cheerfully,

“Well, I am to give you a present, I suppose. Is that what it means? Well, what is it to be? A new gown —a necklace—what?”

But Betty shakes her head. “I never wear out my old gowns, and who would see my necklace?”

“What do you say to a little outing?” asks he.

He says it in a low voice, as if he knew that it was a proposition of a contraband nature, and nervously glances over his shoulder as he makes it.

“A little jaunt—quite a little one. It is so long since you and I have had a jaunt together, Betty.”

But again Betty shakes her head. “Impossible!” she says, reproach~ fully; and yet a little regretfully, too. “How could mother spare us?”

“Not for long, of course,” rejoins he, hastily, “but just a run up to London for a couple of nights. We might be there and back almost before she had time to miss us; just a run up to see a play.”

“It is a long time” (rather ruefully) “since I have seen a play,” says Betty.

She is leaning over his chair, her arms round his neck, and is reading the theatrical announcements with him.

“Lyceum, Strand, Vaudeville,” she says, with a little sigh, that shows that she, too, is nibbling at the temptation. “How nice they all look!”

“We will do a couple of plays, Betty!” cries her father, audaciously, and in a higher key than he has yet spoken in. “I see that they are giving that old piece, ‘The First Night,’ at the Court. It was the first play I ever saw. My father took me to it when I was quite a little chap. Horace Wigan played in it. You do not remember Horace Wigan? No! Why should we not go to-morrow, eh?”

His daughter has put up her hand apprehensively to check him: “Hush!” she says, hurriedly; “here is mother!” And in effect, as she speaks, the folding-doors have been thrown open; and, as always happens at this hour of the day, Mrs. Brewster is wheeled slowly in on a couch out of her bedroom; Mrs. Brewster, prostrate, transparent, suffering, as usual. In a moment the husband’s voice has sunk to a subdued invalid pitch:

“How are you to-day, dear?” he asks, hastening to his wife’s side, and kindly taking her languid hand, “any better?”

“I shall never be better in this world,” replies she, exhilaratingly; “but,” (her sick eyes wandering suspiciously from one to the other of her two companions) “what is it that I am not to hear, Betty? Why did you say ‘hush?’”

There is a moment of confused silence, uneasily broken by Mr. Brewster. “Betty has been telling me that she is twenty-one to-day.”

“She could hardly object to my hearing that,” replies her mother, drily. “Come, Betty, what was it?”

“It was only that father was talking nonsense; you know that he does sometimes,” replies the girl, with a little constrained laugh, kneeling down beside her mother’s sofa, and raising her thin fingers.

“I am not at all sure that it was such nonsense, after all!” says he, speaking in a rather blustering voice, which his daughter knows to conceal much inward misgiving.

“I—I—was only proposing to—to—take her for a little outing, you see,” (after a pause, as his proposition is received in entire silence) “you see,” (growing nervous) “she—she has not a very lively time of it—for a girl mewed up with us two old people.”

Still silence. At last, “I am sorry that you are so dull, Betty,” says the invalid, in a wounded voice, withdrawing her hand. “Why did you not tell me so before?” But at this, poor Betty collapses into sobs.

“Good God!” cries Mr. Brewster, starting up and stamping about the room for a moment, forgetful of the sanctity of the spot. “I mean, bless me, Maria, my dear, what has the poor girl done?” Maria’s answer is what the answer of any invalid who respects herself must inevitably be, a sinking flat back on her pillows, with hands and feet grown suddenly rigid, in a faint, so admirably counterfeited, as to take in even herself. Mr. Brewster is quietly, and perhaps a little compassionately, hustled out of the room by his daughter, and thus in disastrous ignominy his bold project ends. And yet—such are the tides in the affairs of men—on that very day week he is buying Worlds, and Truths, and Queens, for Betty at the station, to beguile their joint journey up to London, for that very outing upon which Mrs. Brewster would seem to have put so complete an extinguisher. And, stranger still, it is Mrs. Brewster herself who sends them. Whether it is the sight of her patient daughter, or of her clumsy, yet most genuinely remorseful husband, or some pinch of her own not dead but only slumbering conscience that effects the change, is of little moment. Certain it is that it is effected.

“What day do you set off?” she asks, suddenly; one evening, as she lies with her eyes fixed on her daughter’s face; that unjoyous young face, which is bent with untiring gentleness over that piece of work of her mother’s which is eternally needing to be set right.

“Set off?” repeats Betty, lifting her head, and looking apprehensive and a little guilty. “Where to?”

“That is what you can tell me better than I can tell you,” replies the mother, drily, with a faint shade of resentment still lingering against her will in her tone. “Your father was anything but explicit; he spoke of ‘an outing;’ that might mean Kamschatka or Kew.”

“He—he was talking nonsense!” replies Betty, red and stammering.

“No, he was not,” rejoins the mother, calmly; “but I was taken so ill—if you remember, it was on the day that I was taken so ill—that he had not time to explain.”

This sincere attempt to displace her husband’s unlucky suggestion and her own seizure from their natural relation as cause and effect, an attempt which, as she knows in her own heart, takes in neither herself nor her daughter, brings a weak pink flush into the sick woman’s cheek.

“He was talking nonsense!” repeats Betty, murmuringly; “men often do,” she adds, with an audacious and illiberal generality.

“What he said was quite true,” rejoins Mrs. Brewster, reflectively; “it is a cruelly dull life for a young thing like you.”

“But I am not young!” cries Betty, eagerly; “I am old, old! If you only knew how old I feel inside.”

“Well, if you do,I do not!” says Mrs. Brewster, with a sort of tremulous playfulness. “To tell you the truth, I think we have been mewing ourselves up a great deal too much of late; that we should be all the better for having a little air from the outer world let in upon us; in short,”’ (laughing nervously) “I have half a mind to join in your outing myself.”

“Oh, if you could!” cries the girl, kneeling down by her mother, and laying her head caressingly on the pillow beside the invalid; “but since you cannot—”

“Since I cannot,” interrupts the other with derision; “you must go instead of me, and come back and tell me all about it. There, say no more. That is settled.”

And settled, despite Betty’s many tearful and compunctious remonstrances, it is. The day has come. Betty has, as nearly as possible, lost the train through her inability, at the last moment, to tear herself away from that shaded room and that couch that of late have been all her world.

“Are you sure that you can do without us? Are you sure that you will not miss us?” she reiterates, with her eyes full of tears; and half-a-dozen of Mr. Brewster’s impatient “Bettys” are turned a deaf ear to by his daughter. But at last he gets her away; at last he gets her to the station and into the train. She had set off in a most unenjoying mood—apprehensive, half remorseful—but she has not gone five miles before nature and youth resume their inevitable sway.

Did ever express train rush with so smooth a speed? and how pleasant once again to see the flying hedges, browsing sheep, smoky towns galloping away together. Gallop as they may, they are yet stationary, and she is tearing onwards. What a feeling of superiority it gives one! And then, when London is reached, what can be more exhilarating and amusing than the streets? They seem to present a broad farce, got up and acted expressly for her entertainment. And the real farce to which they go in the evening? It is not very funny, but they laugh till they cry over it. Their mirth is so uncontrollable, indeed, that one or two persons in the stalls near them turn their heads to look in astonishment at them. But then, perhaps, these persons laugh every night.

Mr. Brewster and his daughter are still laughing over the threadbare jests in their sitting-room at the hotel on their return. They are still laughing when Mr. Brewster leaves the room to give some directions to the servant for the next day. He is not absent more than ten minutes. On his return, he finds Betty standing in the middle of the room. Her face is turned towards him, but, as he sees at the first glance, it is not the same face as that with which he had left her. There is no smile upon it, nor any expression of recognition. It wears the look which he has once before seen upon it—the sightless stare of a somnambulist. An indefinable terror seizes him as he goes up to her.

“What is the matter with you?” he asks, unsteadily. “Why do you look so odd?”

“We must go home,” she says, speaking in a mechanical, modulated voice, as one in a trance, to whom the words are dictated by some resistless alien power. “Mother is dead! She touched me on the foot as she went by.”

They are nearly the same words as those which Mr. Brewster had heard his daughter employ on the occasion of her cousin’s death; but this time he can meet them with no derisive incredulity. A sudden trembling has seized him, such as had seized upon his sick wife on that former occasion.

“What do you mean?” he asks, almost in a whisper—“did you—did you see her?”

She makes no answer; only moves slowly towards the door of the adjoining bedroom.

“Betty!” cries the father, in an agony of apprehension, following her, “you must speak! You have no right to say such things! What did you see? In God’s name tell me what did you see?”

But she is as if she heard him not. Without making any answer she passes out of sight. Something tells him that it would be vain to make any further appeals to her. It is even extremely doubtful whether she was aware of his presence. He throws himself into an arm chair, and then, rising, begins to walk fast and feverishly up and down the room, in the vain endeavour to shake off the panic that is mastering him.

“The girl is of an exceptionally nervous organisation. She has been upset by this sudden change from the long gloom of her past life; it is a form of hysteria.”

But even as he says to himself these reassuring phrases, a cold reminiscence checks them. He had called her hysterical on the occasion of that former warning. His eyes fall accidentally on the clock. The hand points to half-past twelve. The thought crosses his mind with a sort of relief that all the telegraph offices must be shut. The only sensible course to pursue is to dismiss the matter as quickly as possible from his mind, go to bed and dream, if he can compass it, of the farce, whose merriment seems now to be parted from him by a chasm. But to go to bed is one thing; to go to sleep another. Mr. Brewster finds the one as difficult as the other was easy. Reason as he may with himself, chide, ridicule his own folly, there is not one hour of the night or early morning that he does not hear told by all the church and hotel clocks. From the short, tired doze, into which he falls at last, he is awakened by the opening of the door, and springs back to consciousness with a frightened jump. Pooh! it is only his man with his hot water! And so it is. But, beside the hot water, what is it that his valet is carrying in his hand? Is it not an envelope, the first glimpse of whose colour turns the master sick? In a second he has snatched it, torn it open, mastered its short contents, which, after all, he had already known. “Come home at once. Mrs. Brewster died suddenly at twelve last night.”

****

Mr. Brewster and his daughter have returned to the so lately left home. It is the day before the funeral, and they are sitting together in that heavy idleness which characterises such dread days. It is a dark afternoon, and the gloom is so greatly deepened by the lowered blinds that occupation would be difficult. They are holding each other’s hands, as if that helped them a little. For nearly an hour neither has spoken, but suddenly Mr. Brewster breaks the leaden silence.

“Betty,” he says, in a low voice, “how did you know? Did you see her? I asked you at the time, but you did not answer me. You did not seem to hear.”

She hears him now at all events, for her hand first trembles violently in his clasp, and is then withdrawn from it. But neither now does she answer.

“Tell me,” repeats the father with imploring urgency, “Betty, tell me, did you see her?”

Betty has put up her hand to her forehead, and into her face has come an expression of dazed, bewildered misery.

“I don’t know,” she answers, uncertainly.

“You do not know?” repeats he, with gathering excitement; “you mus! know! Think, child, think! You cannot have forgotten; did you really see her?”

The look of puzzled wretchedness grows intenser.

“Oh, do not ask me,” she cries, loudly, in a voice of acute pain. “l would tell you if I could, but—I—I—do not know.”

Her voice dies slowly away at the last word into a wail of misery, and on her forehead the intense look as of one agonising to overtake a gone memory, grows more painfully evident. It would be inhumanity to urge her further, so the problem has to be left as unsolved as ever.

HER FOURTH VISION

Another year has slipped by. Poor Mrs. Brewster’s sudden death has long been superseded as a topic of conversation in the neighbourhood by less threadbare ones. To tell the truth, it had never been a subject of universal lamentation. Even into the very earliest expressions of pity and regret have crept hopes. that, when the days of mourning for the poor lady are ended, the house may be once more open for social purposes. And now that the year of conventional seclusion is running to its last sands, faint signs of such an impending re-opening are not altogether wanting, to gladden the hearts of the dancing boys and girls in the vicinage.

Mr. Brewster is far from being an old man. At fifty-five, under healthy conditions, there is still a great deal of enjoying power left in a man, and Betty is undeniably a young woman. At twenty-two, in fact, she is, and looks, a younger woman than she was and did at twenty-one. Betty and her father would account it blasphemy were you to hint such a thing to them, but in point of fact they are a great deal happier than they were while their suffering Maria yet blessed them with her presence and her sofa. The sofa had been reverently wheeled into a corner, the rooms are again full of light and air. Mr. Brewster need no longer tone down his hearty voice lest it should break into some doze, snatched fitfully at unexpected moments of the day. Betty need no longer cut short her stroll in the garden, or her rides in the lanes, in the fear that a faint, complaining voice may be summoning her, and she out of hearing. They have both, to do them justice, honestly tried to check the first weak germs of cheerfulness in themselves and each other, but in vain. Little innovations, for which neither knew whom to blame, have crept in somehow. The tennis ground, long disused, has been new-mown, rolled, and marked out; occasionally, a young man or a girl, driving over to call, has lured Betty, reluctant at first, half-shocked and yet hankering, into a game. Occasionally, too, one such young guest, a man, has stayed so late that it would be a breach of the first elements of hospitality not to invite him to stay to dinner. And somehow, after dinner—if one has a guest, one must do what one can to amuse him.

All three have strayed into the billiard-room, and knocked the balls about till the stable clock has tolled midnight. This one guest, after a while, becomes singled out from the other chance comers, by the frequency and regularity of his appearances. Without any but a tacit invitation, he has fallen into the habit of coming, first on all Mondays; next on all Mondays and Fridays; then on all Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; by-and-bye he occasionally throws in a Sunday too; and sometimes a Saturday, if he has anything particular to say. Perhaps, being a moderately well-to-do-squire, with an agent whom he has no reason for distrusting, and a house which, though of comfortable dimensions for two, is over roomy for one, he is thankful to find a complaisant small family on whom he can bestow his too abundant leisure.

It is a Thursday evening, and Mr. Brewster and his daughter are sitting tête-à-tête after dinner; he turning over the sheets of the just-arrived Globe, she placidly stitching opposite him, when a ring at the hall door bell is heard through the house. Rings at the front door are, in the depth of the country, not common occurrences at nine o’clock in the evening, and are wont to excite surprise if not alarm. Such, however, is not the emotion provoked in the master of the house on this occasion. He looks over the top of his Globe at his daughter, who shows no great eagerness to meet his eye, and says, lifting his brows, with an expression half reproachful, half humorous, “Again, Betty? Why, I thought this was our free day, did not you?”

“Free day!” repeats: Betty, stammering. “Free from what? I—I don’t know what you mean!”

“I am sure you do not; of course not; you cannot give a guess,” replies her father, drily.

There is a smile on his lips, but his eyes are vexed. He has just begun to enjoy his life again, good, easy man, and in that enjoyment Betty’s presence is a main factor. She hears, and is stung by the annoyance in his tone. Running impulsively over to him, she sits down on the floor at his knee.

“Do you think he comes too often?” she asks, trembling. “Do you mind?”

“It is to be hoped for my sake that I do not,” rejoins he, still more drily than before; then, lifting by force the girl’s face, which she has buried on the arm of his chair, “Why, Betty, you are as red as a turkey cock. You traitor, you knew he was coming. Might I ask—with an ungovernable intonation of bitterness and alarm—whether he has anything particular to say?”

Steps are heard in the hall. The servants, who have not hurried themselves, are going to the door. She must make haste to answer.

“Do you mind?” she repeats, agitatedly. “If you do, he shall go away; he shall say nothing.”

For a moment Mr. Brewster struggles, and it would be, perhaps, rash to say that no malediction against his future son-in-law formulates itself in his heart. Then, his natural unselfishness, which was kept in high training through many years by his sainted Maria, conquers, and he says cheerfully, “Mind? Why should I mind? Do you think that I want to have a cranky old maid on my hands?” Then, as the door opens and the guest is announced, “How are you, Carrington? Very glad to see you.”

****

Two months later, Carrington and Betty are made one. Mr. Brewster has been the life of the wedding party, has made a better speech and more jokes, and has thrown more shoes and rice than any other member of the company. When the last guest has gone, he shuts himself into his study and cries like a child. Then he has his portmanteau packed, and takes the night mail for London and Paris. His empty house, void now both of his poor, peevish Maria and his consoling Betty, is more than he can bear. He is absent above a year, his travels being extended beyond the familiar bounds of Europe to China and Japan. What is there to bring him back? But at the end of the year there is something. Does not obligation lie upon him to go home and see Betty’s baby? The thought of Betty with a baby makes him laugh, albeit tenderly. And then, at the close of a long summer day’s travelling, comes the re-union with Betty herself. Betty, who cannot hang long enough about his neck, or reproach him fondly enough with his protracted absence, or tell him often enough how she has wearied for a sight of his face. And yet, he thinks to himself, with a sort of semi-bitterness, “Can anyone so blooming have wearied much really?”

His Betty was a pale, shut bud, this Betty is an expanded flower, that has opened its petals wide to the sun of happiness—that sun which he had never been able to make shine upon her. But, in time, honestly struggled against, this bitterness goes.

His daughters unfeigned delight in his company, the ruthless way in which she makes everyone’s convenience—even adored husband’s and worshipped baby’s—curtsey to his, could not fail to soothe a self-love more susceptible than Mr. Brewster’s. His visit prolongs itself from days to weeks, from weeks to months. His daughter is always pressing upon him her loving importunities that he should live with them. “Why should you ever go?” she asks, for the hundredth. time, on the evening preceding the day he has at length finally fixed upon for his departure. “jack says he does not know what he shall do without you.”

“Perhaps time and the consolations of religion may reconcile him to the blow,” replies Mr. Brewster, with a little mild satire.

“He says he cannot account for my not being nicer than I am, having such a father,” pursues Betty, wheedlingly; “come, you have not answered me; why should not you stay with us always?”

“I must not make myself too common, Betty,” says he, jestingly; “if I lived with you, you could not make such a fuss with me as you have been doing for the last three months. I like to be made a fuss with.”

And this is all the answer she gets out of him, and so she has to let him go, but not without plenteous tears and strenuous adjurations to return, before the month is out, for good. He has now been gone a week. For the first day or two after losing him, his daughters spirits drooped extremely; but before long, her youth, the happy conditions of her life, her husband’s good humour, and the baby’s allurements restore her equanimity.

It is an August evening, hot and fair, and Betty has stepped out of the dining-room window, according to her wont on such evenings, to bid the sleepy flowers good night, and hail the moon, the great, red, harvest moon wheeling up above the beechwood, and waited on by her silver handmaid, stars. Mr. Carrington remains at the dining-table, sipping his claret, and looking out contentedly at the flitting white figure that now and then stops to throw in an affectionate glance at him, and an enthusiastic ejaculation as to the loveliness of the night, to which latter he responds with all a Briton’s unexpansive brevity. For a moment or two the figure has disappeared—gone, no doubt, to visit its Night Stocks, and Mr. Carrington has fallen into a placid reverie on beeves and farming implements, when he is startled by the sound of a sharp cry from the direction of the garden. To jump up and fly through the window is with him the work of a moment. He has, after all, not far to go. At a hundred paces from him on the terrace, he sees his wife standing, and, as he nears her, perceives that she is gazing before her in a blank, unseeing way. Surprised and frightened, he takes her by the arm, crying “What is it?”

“Father is dead,” she says, in a voice of acute agony; not as if answering him, nor even being aware of his presence. “I know it; he touched me on the head as he went by.”

“Betty,” cries the young man. puzzled and frightened, “what is the matter? What are you talking about?”

He knows nothing of her visions. It is not a subject, which. since her father’s last appeal to her for explanation, on the occasion of her mother’s death, has been mentioned between him and her. Much less has any breath of them ever reached an outsider. She does not answer. She only gazes stonily straight before her in the moonlight. A cold terror seizes on Carrington. Has she gone mad? In an instant the thought has flashed through his mind. Is there madness in her family? Can he ever formerly have heard a whisper of, and forgotten it? If not, is this the beginning of some frightful illness, some hideous catalepsy? He catches her hand. It is cold and rigid.

“Betty! Betty! why do you frighten me so? What is it? For God’s sake, speak!”

But she turns away from him, and begins to walk dumbly towards the house. He overtakes her, and now, thoroughly alarmed, catches her in his arms, “Betty, what have I done to you? Will not you speak to me? You must speak.”

Still she is silent, nor can any adjuration, however solemn, or entreaty, however tender, succeed in drawing one further word from her. Before he knows it she has slipped out of his arms and made her way indoors. Mr. Carrington passes a dreadful night, entirely sleepless, and crowded with hideous fears. Before his eyes, whether shut or open, the spectre madness does not cease to dance. On what other hypothesis can he explain his wife’s sudden seizure? Is it the first of the kind, or has she previously been subject to such? This is one of the problems that torment him, and that he has no means of solving. There is no old nurse or other faithful family servant, whom he can consult upon the point. His wife’s maid came to her only at her marriage He has not had the heart to go to bed, but has seen from his dressing-room window, with the tired eyes of one that has all night watched the stars go out, and the new day that in August still comes early, unfolding one after another, and putting on its many-coloured robes of splendour. Will this new day solve his riddle for him? His head aches, and his eyeballs burn. Perhaps the morning wind may make him feel less stupefied. Having listened at Betty’s door and heard no sound—perhaps she may be in a wholesome sleep, from which she may wake cured and sane—he goes downstairs and out of doors. As he is walking towards the stable, drawing in long breaths of the exquisite summer air, he sees a telegraph boy approaching him. “For me?” he asks, indifferently, as the messenger holds out his missive to him, and so absently opens it, his thoughts full of his own trouble—so full that for the first moment they do not grasp the meaning of the words presented to his eye: “Mr. Brewster seized with apoplexy last night at nine o’clock; dead in ten minutes; come or send directions.” For a moment, he reels as if he were drunk, Betty’s words rushing back in ghastly letters of fire before his mind’s eye. She knew it at the very time it had happened! Great God! how did she know it?

HER FIFTH AND LAST VISION

It is no great wonder that after such a shock Betty falls dangerously ill. For weeks she lies between life and death, and months elapse before she is restored to her former strength. Her husband nurses her with devoted and untiring tenderness; sits by her through long night after long night, listening to her wanderings—(for she is often delirious)—wanderings about the long-departed playfellow of her childhood, Rachel; about dear, dead dogs and birds; about her sick mother; nay, most of all, about her father too. And yet, listen as closely as he may, not once does he catch any least word as to the mysterious seizure and the unexplained fore-warning which had preceded that father’s death. Not even in highest delirium, when the bonds of reason are loosened, and the thoughts and feelings deepest buried, come to the surface, does she make any most distant allusion to it. It must be gone from her mind as completely as if it had never found a resting-place there.

After a long time she creeps slowly back to convalescence, an uncertain, precarious convalescence, at first, but which gradually gains in solidity and dependableness as the languid days go by. Days passed, in lying for the most part, silent and pale in her great arm chair, pressing occasionally her husband’s hand, as he sits fondly at her feet, or stroking his hair, and occasionally breaking into faint smiles at the antics of the baby, who has taken the opportunity of her mother’s illness to double herself in size, and has adopted a mode of progressing along the floor from chair leg to chair leg, which Betty, not having much acquaintance with other babies, thinks original, and admires with proportionate ecstasy. After a while, the hand that had feebly patted Carrington’s head rests on his arm, as he leads her, warmly wrapped up, to the nearest of her garden haunts. The first day she does not get further than the terrace. The last time that she had visited it, was the evening on which he had found her cold and struck in the moonlight. His memory is full of this circumstance, as he leads her slowly along; but it seems to have no place in hers. Perhaps it is the entirely changed aspect of the scene, from summer moonlight to winter sunshine that keeps recollection at bay. She makes little, interested comments upon the rimy grass, the frost-bound flower borders, upon the removal of some remembered shrub, but no ripple seems to stir the waters of any deeper memory.

Seeing her so insensible, he cannot resist experimentalising upon her, so far as to pause at the exact spot upon which, on that fatal night, he had found her standing. But she only looks up at him, smiling out of her furs, her thin face a little tinted by the sharp wind, and asks,

“What are you stopping for? You need not think that I am tired yet.” He looks earnestly into her eyes, but they are obviously entirely unconscious, as is the brain behind them, of the remembrances of which his are full. It is clear that he must defer any probing of memory until she is fully restored to health. And when at length—it is indeed at length—this comes to pass, his mind has taken such a habit of anxiety for his fragile treasure, that he shrinks from imperilling the hardly-won good by presenting to her mind any images but those that are smiling and cheerful. From day to day he defers the putting of that question which is so often at the end of his tongue, and so it comes to pass that it is never asked at all. Time, as he goes by, brings many good things to the Carringtons, and so far—and now the baby is three years old—no bad ones If there are any drawbacks to the fact of possessing an only child, even they will shortly be removed, for Betty hopes, ere long, to embrace a son. She is looking forward with strong longings, and without any fear, to the expected blessing.

No dreams or visions, or eerie Warnings of any kind have disturbed her placid prosperity. The season is as prosperous as she, and now, in late June, the farmers are garnering their heavy hay crops without a drop of rain, and life is one long fragrant feast with the strawberry beds for board. Mr. Carrington has set off upon a long day’s trout fishing—an elastic sort of little excursion, which may end to-night, may be prolonged till to-morrow.

“Do not hurry back,” says Betty, bidding her husband good bye; “enjoy yourself, old man! I am only afraid” —glancing from the absolutely unclouded sky to the rather parched grass—“that you will find the river a little low.” And so, in the early morning, she waves him a smiling farewell, leaning in her cool white gown against the porch, and crying cheerfully, “Bring me home plenty of trout!”

The day turns out a very hot one, but what matter to one who can sit under a great beech’s shade all day, with a cabbage leaf full of strawberries beside her, and engaged in no severer exertion than to watch little Betty tumbling in the hay, and occasionally set her dislocated hat straight again upon her yellow curls. There seems a slight want of imagination in having christened the child Betty, too, and so the elder Betty pointed out to her husband.

“Will not it make a great confusion having two Bettys?” she asks. But he, in all the hot and foolish ardour of young husbandhood, asseverates that there cannot be too much of a good thing; there cannot be too many Bettys. She lifts her eyebrows with a languid smile.

“Then if we have six daughters they will all be Bettys!” But this extravagant supposition he refuses to face. And now little Betty’s bed-time has come. It is hard work to tear her away, kicking and screaming, from the sympathetic hay-makers. It is hard work to get her into her bath, and it is harder still to get her out again. Far and wide the water splashes, and the soap-suds fly under the excited plunges of her fat legs. The delights of the day have almost turned her little brain. Laughing, crying, wildly hilarious; finally, very tired and outrageously cross, she is at length laid in bed, and almost before her naughty gold head has touched the pillow, is asleep.

“Fast as a rock,” says the nurse, bending admiringly over her. So fast that neither nurse nor mother need lower their voices as they discuss with the grave interest that befits so momentous a theme, what frock little Betty is to wear at a strawberry-eating and hay-making party in the neighbourhood to which she is to be taken on the morrow.

“Of course, she looks best in white,” says the nurse, thoughtfully reviewing the little garments spread out for inspection; “it shows up her skin best. I never saw such a skin, if you will believe me, ma’am. I really cannot tell sometimes where the child’s frock ends and her neck begins.”

“She is as fair as a lily,” asserts the mother, proudly.

“She has got shockingly tanned to-day,” pursues the nurse, regretfully. “I could not get her to keep her hat on. As fast as I put it on she tore it off again. She was like a mad thing, and I did want her to look her best to-morrow.”

“But she will,” rejoins the mother, fondly. “She is a most satisfactory child; she always looks her best when one wants her. Bring out some more of her frocks. I do not quite like any of these.”

The nurse complies, and walking to a high press, sacred to little Betty’s voluminous wardrobe, begins to pull out drawers and choose the daintiest of the many little changes of raiment lying there in lavender. Her mistress does not interrupt her by any comment or suggestion. When her selection is at length made, the nurse returns towards her mistress with a heap of little clothes thrown over her arm. She is so occupied in turning them over, that she does not look up until she is quite close to Mrs. Carrington, when, lifting her eyes, she becomes aware that the latter, with an ash-white face and a terrible blank look, is putting up both her hands, as if keeping off from herself something unspeakably feared and terrible.

“I must die to-morrow!” she says, in a voice so changed, so full of awe and horror, as to be almost unrecognisable. “I know. It touched me on the heart as it went by.”

“Good God, ma’am, what is the matter? What ails you? What touched you?” shrieks the nurse, beside herself with vague fear.

But her mistress makes no answer, and only falls from her chair on the floor in a dead, dead swoon.

****

The river has not been so low as Mr. Carrington feared, the sky too, has clouded over opportunely, and he has had better sport than he hoped for. He has fished on and on and on; down and down the river, until it was too late to return home that night; so he puts up at a little, riverside ale-house, well known to him of old; dines hungrily on some of his own trout, and, sleeping sweetly, dreams of May flies and Ginger hackles. All next day he fishes again; and it is not till evening that he at length sees his own house rise before him against the rose-red sunset. He has walked from the station. Since he had not sent word at what hour he was to be expected, no vehicle awaits him. But the distance is short, and he enjoys the walk, with the prospect of Betty’s smile and some more trout at the end of it. “How early they have shut up the house,” he says to himself as he comes within sight of the building, and becomes aware that all the blinds are drawn down. “What is the meaning of that, I wonder?”

A little puzzled, but not alarmed, he walks in, and, entering the house by the garden door, looks into his wife’s boudoir. She is not there. Into the drawing-room, she is not there; the library, not there; the smoking-room, not there. He passes out upon the terrace and calls “Betty, Betty,” but there is no answer. “Pooh! how stupid; of course she has gone up to dress for dinner.” He runs lightly upstairs and turns the handle of his wife’s bed-room door. It is locked. What does this mean? He calls “Betty, Betty, open the door.” But she does not answer. The idea strikes him that he can enter by his dressing-room. Yes, its door is not locked. In one moment he has passed through it and is in the bed-room. Why are his legs beginning to shake under him? The light is dim, the blinds pulled down to the bottom, and no candles lit. Betty cannot he here; surely she is not here. Involuntarily his eye falls on the bed. What is this? There is a great white sheet drawn over it, and beneath that sheet an outline. In a second (how he gets there he never knows) he is at the bedside, the sheet is turned down, and he has learned What lies beneath it. His Betty dead and rigid, with a dead baby beside her! For it, whatever the mysterious messenger was, has kept its word.

Mrs. Smith of Longmains

(1885)

SCENE I

It was a bitter January morning, a morning that obviously was not going to mend into a tolerable day, but had every intention of increasing into an intolerable one. The state of the weather was, perhaps, enough to account for that of my appearance, as to the unfavourable condition of which, the chorus of comments from three over-truthful daughters could not and did not leave in doubt for a moment after my entering the breakfast room.

“How wretched you look!” said Alice, the eldest.

“You are in for one of your bad colds,” said Ruth, the second.

“You have been writing upstairs in a room without a fire, as we forbid you to do,” said Susan, the youngest and most tyrannous,

I made no sort of answer to these compliments, but walking up to the fire stood holding my hands to the blaze.

“Do not play us the same trick that you did last year,” said Alice, setting a chair close to the fender for me, “and fall ill on the eve of the bachelors’ ball!”

“No,” added Ruth, laughing; “we bore it once in a way, but we draw the line at a second time!”

“You would not palm us off again upon Lady Brown, would you?” asked Susan, coaxingly, kneeling down on the rug beside me, and beginning to rub one of my cold hands between her two warm ones. “You would not entrust your little ones to an old monster who eats supper until she cannot see, and then snatches them away just as the real fun is beginning.”

“It is very odd,” said I, with a somewhat sarcastic crossness; “how solicitous you girls always grow about my health at this time of year. I might be moribund all through Lent without any of you perceiving it.”

“I think we are very kind to you all the year round,” returned Sue, giving my hand, which she still chafed in her own, a rather rebuking pat. “It is very carping of you to notice it if we are a little more attentive one month than another.”

“Well, don’t be nervous,” said I, trying to laugh. “When the day comes, you will not find me absent from my bench of torment.” But at that they all burst upon me in full cry. “Your bench of torment! Well, I do call that hypocrisy, mammy We always say that nobody enjoys a ball so much as you; it is invariably we that have to drag you away, not you us.”

I had not spirits to disclaim.

"‘If I were you,” said Alice authoritatively; “I should just go straight back to bed and have some salvolatile and water.”

“Or some white wine-whey,” suggested Ruth.

“Yes, do,” said Susan, “and I will come and read you to sleep. You always say that my reading puts you to sleep faster than anyone’s.”

“That is a left-handed compliment, Sue,” said Alice, laughing.

“I know it is,” replied Sue, composedly, “but she does say so, don’t you, mammy?”

“Will not you come now — at once?” asked Alice, taking my other hand. “It would be far the wisest plan if you could get into a good perspiration—”

But at that I found voice to interrupt her, rising suddenly from my chair, and flinging away the caresses of my too-officious children.

“I do not know what you would be at,” said I, indignantly. “Quelle mouche vous pique? What possesses you all with the idea that I am ill? Have I made any complaint? though indeed, to have six gimlet eyes fastened upon your face, and three croaking voices in your ears, is enough to make you ill if anything is. For heaven’s sake disabuse your mind of this extraordinary fancy, and let us come to breakfast!”

There was such unmistakeable exasperation in my tone, that my children saw I was not to be trifled with, so, acquiescing in my proposition, they and I sat down to breakfast. But I caught them several times casting surreptitious glances at me to see whether I ate as usual, and whether or not I shivered aguishly in the chill with which they were so determined to credit me. To baulk them, I dodged behind the tea kettle, and tried to eat more heartily than my wont, in which, however, I was not very successful. Conversation was slack, which, to do us justice, it was not apt to be at our breakfast-table. Its present flagging condition was attributable, I imagine, partly to my supposed ill-health (my appearance must have been very much more deplorable than I had had any idea of), partly and chiefly to the absence of the master, always, when at home; the originator or fosterer of every joke, and who last night set off for Ireland, in which country he, for the punishment of his sins, possessed some landed estates.

“Poor daddy!” said Alice, looking towards his vacant place. “He must have had a cold crossing last night. I woke at four this morning, when he must have been just halfway over, and thought, ‘Poor daddy! rather you than I.”

“I dreamed of him,” said Ruth “such an absurd dream. I dreamed we were giving a large party on the sly in his absence, and that he came back unexpectedly in the middle of it, like Sir Thomas Bertram in ‘Mansfield Park,’ and that we were all in such a fright. I woke just as I was trying to hide one of my partners between the legs of the billiard-room table — such a likely place to escape detection!”

They all laughed.

“And I,” said Sue, “slept so soundly that I never once thought or dreamt of him at all — rather brutal of me!”

“It is fortunate that one is not answerable for one’s dream-self,” said Ruth, recurring to the thought of her own dream; “one is sometimes such a rogue and sometimes such a booby in one’s dreams.”

“And you, mammy?” said Sue, amiably trying to draw me into the conversation, from which, since the beginning of breakfast, I had almost entirely excluded myself, “what sort of a night had you? The drunkard’s heavy slumbers” (laughing) “like mine? Or pleasant and probable visions like Ruth’s? Which?”

But I was prevented from replying to this question by the entrance of the butler, who came in to ask whether there were any orders for the coachman.

“Surely not,” said Alice, answering for me. “We shall be skating all the day, and you — you will not be so insane as to stir from the fireside!”

I have always disliked being answered for. I have always known perfectly what my own opinions and wishes were, and have been fully able to express them. My eldest daughter’s growing tendency to reply for me had already on several previous occasions fidgetted me. After a moment’s hesitation, I turned to the butler, saying, “There are no orders for him this morning; if there are any for the afternoon I will let the coachman know at luncheon time.”

Having thus established my authority I rose and left the room rather disagreeably conscious that the girls were whispering behind me. However, I suppose they saw that I was not in a humour to be trifled with, and wisely forbore from offering me any more of their extremely ill-received advice. By and bye I saw them all three setting gleefully off with their skates over their arms to the frozen mere, of which I could catch a glimpse — stiff among its stiffened sedges — between the brown limbs of the January trees. I watched them till their light figures, their tailor gowns and tight jackets, were quite out of sight, and then returned to the oak drawing-room in which I always spent my mornings.

Here I at once found traces of that solicitous care for me on the part of my girls, which my ferocity had hindered them from expressing in words. My favourite chair was drawn close up to the hearth; every chink of window carefully closed usually we were a madly open-air family. On a little table at my elbow stood a bottle of salvolatile, one of camphor, a small jug of hot water, and several lumps of sugar. I rang at once and had them all taken away. Then I sat down by the fire, and sat staring into it for the best part of an hour in entire idleness.

I was not apt to be such a drone. Occupation I had always in plenty. What mother of a family and mistress of a house has not? And, to do myself justice, I had ordinarily no inclination to slight my duties. But, on this particular morning, I neither turned nor attempted to turn my hand to any one thing. I sat over the fire; not even shivering or sneezing (for my children were on a wrong scent when they made up their obstinate young minds that I was threatened with influenza), occasionally conscious that I was muttering to myself under my breath. At last, “this will really not do,” said I, aloud; pushing back my chair from the fire. “I do not know what has come to me. I hope that I am not going off my head.”

So saying, I put my hand to my forehead, in which there was a disagreeable pulse beating, and walked to the window, An ugly, grinding, black frost, long, iron-bound bare borders, through which it seemed impossible that crocuses could ever push their gracious golden heads; a sad robin, a chaffinch, and three sparrows, all hungry, and naturally silent, seeking on the gravel walk the poor remains of the crumbs thrown out at breakfast. There was nothing assuredly in the face of the outer world to put me in better spirits. But none the less did I continue aimlessly to gape at it. “Shall I?” said I, under my breath; “anyone would say I was mad if I did, it would be the ne plus ultra of folly and irrationality; if the girls heard of it, and of my reason, they would think I was ripe for Bedlam; but — but it would be a relief! After all, I am mistress in my own house, why should I not? I will.” I almost ran to the bell, and rang it sharply. But, in the interval between my having pulled it and the appearance of the servant who answered it, there was time for another change to come over my spirit.

“It is twelve miles if it is a step,” said I, internally; “the days are dark at four; if I give way to these imaginings, I shall gradually become unfit for all the ordinary duties of life: it may be an insidious form of hysteria.”

The footman entered.

“Some coals, please,” said I. I resumed my place by the fire, and took up some knitting. Turning the heel of a stocking requires some attention. It might absorb mine. In vain. My heel, or rather Ruth’s — had rashly embarked upon hers entirely failed to follow, even approximately, the outline of the human foot, and I dropped it back into the work-basket. I picked up a novel. Alice had described it as breathlessly interesting, and, indeed, had sat up late over night to finish it, unable to tear herself away from its pages. I could not chain my mind even so far as to make acquaintance with its characters. I laid it, too, down.

“I believe the girls are right,” I said. “I must be ill; this restlessness must be the forerunner of some serious sickness.”

I walked uneasily out of the room into the adjoining one, which, as we never sat in it except of an evening, looked unfriendly and formal by daylight; then out into the hall, down a passage into the billiard-room. I had no motive for going there or anywhere else, only I could not keep still. As my eye fell on the billiard-table, I remembered Ruth’s silly dream of having hid her admirer between its legs. What an absurd dream! All dreams are absurd! I strayed back into the hall, and again looked through the window. The drive stretched away before me, dark-coloured between the whitened winter grass. “It would take an hour and three-quarters, driving at a good pace,” said I; “if I set off at two, I should be there by a quarter-past three. I need not stay more than half-an-hour, and should be back here by half-past five. Pooh! In the country that is a mere nothing. I will decide to go.”

A second time I pulled the bell; but a second time, before it was answered, half-a-dozen adverse reasons rushed into my mind and made me repent my resolution. The road, as far as I remembered it — for part of it I had travelled only once or twice in my life — was not a good one. The stables might be cold, and give the horses influenza, a pleasant piece of news with which to greet the master of the house on his return from Ireland. That last thought was conclusive, I would abandon the idea definitively. And meanwhile the footman had come in, and was looking expectantly at me. What could I be supposed to have rung for? My fancy supplied no suggestion.

“Never mind,” said I, stupidly; “it was a mistake; it was nothing.”

At the same moment the back door opened, and in came the three girls, bringing a whiff of frost, and buxom health and jollity with them, and still — as I was not long in discovering — that baneful idea of my ill-health. “Mammy, what are you thinking of? Out in the draught, away from the fire. Back, back, this instant!”

“Did you take the salvolatile,” asked the first, anxiously.

“Did you try the camphor?” inquired the second.

“Did you see that we had put the sugar handy for you?” asked the third.

“I saw all your kind remedies,” replied I, drily, “and I had them all at once removed. I see no reason why a perfectly healthy woman’s drawing-room should be littered with physic bottles.”

While I was speaking the gong sounded — for some reason, I forget what, we were lunching earlier than usual that day — at one. The girls scampered off to get ready. During our repast I do not think that I was much more loquacious than I had been at breakfast, hut my children made up for my silence by the volume of their chatter. Once or twice they asked me why I was looking out of the window, and what I expected to see there? In point of fact, I was repenting of my repentance, but I need not say that I did not tell them so. Towards the middle of luncheon the butler again enquired, “whether there were any orders for the coachman?”

“Surely not,” said Alice, answering for me, “the roads are like looking glass, and it Is beginning to snow even if you were well.”

“Tell the coachman,” said I interrupting her with some tartness “that I will have the brougham at two.”

There was a moment of silent consternation among my little flock “Then, if it is only into Leighton that you want to go for any shopping,” said Ruth, in a conciliatory voice, “could not you let us do it for you?”

“I am not going into Leighton,” replied I, shortly.

Another moment’s silence.

“Come, now, where are you going?” cried Sue, getting up, coming over to, and kneeling down beside me, n order to try, as I knew, what personal wheedling — usually a very effective weapon in her hands — could do with me.

“Why are you so mysterious?”

“I am not aware,” replied I, pompously, “that I am answerable to my children for my goings out and comings in,” then, sinking into a less majestic tone, “I have no objection to telling you where I am going,” This was not quite true. “I am going to call on Mrs. Smith.”

“Mrs. Smith!”

“Mrs. Smith!”

“What Mrs. Smith?”

In three different keys of disapproving astonishment.

“Mrs. Smith of Longmains.”

“Why, you do not know her.”

“Why, it is twelve miles off.”

“Why, daddy and Mr. Smith are not on speaking terms.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied I, gaining in firmness as I perceived the weight of opposition brought to bear upon me, “I do know Mrs. Smith. I have no dislike to a long drive, and if the men of two families come to loggerheads, it is the more reason why the women should try to keep the peace.”

The girls gaped at me. “But why to-day, in Heaven’s name?”

“Why not to-day?”

It seemed as if the butler had taken upon himself to answer my question, for he had again entered the room and was speaking.

“If you please, the coachman is very sorry, but the roads are like hice, and he has not had the horses roughed.”

I hesitated.

“That settles the question,” cries my eldest girl, triumphantly.

“Does it?” said I, toniced back into instantaneous decision. “Let him send for the blacksmith at once to rough the carriage horses as quickly as he can. I must have the brougham as soon as it can be got ready, whatever the weather.”

Servants never look surprised, and the girls were too angry with me, and I suppose thought me too great a fool to be worth spending any more breath upon, so I had no further remonstrances from them to battle with.

It was past three o’clock, instead of two, before I started, but I did set off at last. I got my way!

SCENE II

I got my way, always a pleasant thing to do. But I think in this case the pleasantness inseparable from making one’s will override the wills of other people was reduced as low as it well could be. I was setting off on a raw winter afternoon, with a rising wind, falling barometer, and thickening snow, upon a twelve miles’ drive along a rutty road, to visit a woman whom — despite the stoutness of my assertions to the contrary to my children — I scarcely knew; against whose husband mine had a rooted prejudice, and for bringing her into more intimate relations with whom I was well aware that he would be less than moderately grateful to me. Why, then, was I doing it? This is the question that I am about to answer; and when it is answered, you will probably think me an even greater fool than did my girls, who were ignorant that I had any reasons beyond native pigheadedness.

It would be putting the amount of thought that I was apt to devote to Mrs. Smith far too high to say that I thought of her once a year. She had certainly never crossed my mind on the previous day. Why. then, was it that no sooner was I asleep last night than I was with her? It would have seemed natural that I, who, during all my waking hours, had been occupied with my husband, his plans, his departure, his absence, his return, should, if I dreamed at all, have dreamed of him. He never once crossed my brain. I had other absorbing subjects of interest; an attachment of Sue’s, that I disapproved of, and over which I worried head and heart through many an anxious hour; a budding taste for play [gambling] in my eldest boy; debts of his to be hidden from his father; a wearing fear lest my excellent younger son should break down under the strain of his examination for the Indian Civil Service.

Yes, I had a choice of nightmares in my stable, a row of skeletons in my closet, any one of which would, one might think, have furnished the stuff for my sleeping thoughts as they did unceasingly for my waking ones. Not at all! I passed them all by, to dream wholly, connectedly, and with an astonishing vividness, of Mrs. Smith.

I was with her in a room — a room I had never, to my knowledge, been in before; presumably at Longmains, whose doors I had never entered. It was a room simply. No feature of it impressed itself with any distinctness on my memory, as I have heard has often been the case in other vivid dreams. On reflection, I was not sure that I should know it again. Of one only fact in connection with it was I quite certain, and that was — that as we sat together at the fire, the door, the only door the room possessed, was on our left hand.

We were sitting, as I say, together by the fire. There was a clock on the mantel-piece, what kind of clock it was was dim to me but there was a clock, for I remembered hearing it tick. Mrs. Smith was sitting opposite to me, her back towards the door, facing which I was. I could see her features as plainly as I had done Sues when she knelt beside me at luncheon, asking why I was so mysterious. I could not have believed that I knew Mrs. Smith’s face so well; her unimportant nose, her slightly indicated eyes, lustreless hair, and characterless figure. But out of some lumber-room of memory they must have started, conjured up by the strong spells of sleep. It was a perfectly connected, rational dream. I was I, and she was Mrs. Smith. She was not half Mrs. Smith and half somebody else. She did not suddenly, and without exciting any surprise in my mind — so eccentric are the laws of dreamland —become metamorphosed into another person. She was, and continued to be, Mrs. Smith of Longmains. The one thing that clashed with probability was the fact of my being sitting tête-à-tête with Mrs. Smith in any room late at night, for somehow I knew that it was late at night. I do not remember looking at the clock, but I was by some means aware that such was the case. We were both working, and one of us had said something about its being twelve o’clock. This was followed by Mrs. Smith making an observation which I had forgotten. I was sure that I had heard it perfectly at the time, for immediately on waking I had recalled it, but afterwards it had escaped me, and make what efforts I might, I was unable to recapture it. After all, it was of no great consequence whether I remembered it or not.

What I did remember with a startling distinctness was, that no sooner had she ceased speaking than there came a knock at the door. I remember thinking that it was an odd time of the night for anyone to knock at the door, but Mrs. Smith showed no surprise. She said, phlegmatically, “Come in,” and the door opened at once and in walked the butler. For some strange dream-reason I could not see his face. It was all mist and blur to me. On waking, I felt sure that I should not be able to recognise him again. I was only conscious that he was a young man. He had a coal-box in his hand, and the next thing of which I was aware about him was that he was kneeling at the hearth making up the fire. Again it struck me that it was an odd time to choose to make up the fire. I had, as I tell you, for some reasonless reason, not seen his face, though it must have been turned towards me as he entered the room, but as he knelt at the fire I saw his back— saw it so clearly that I felt that, stooping in the same attitude over the flame, I should recognise it among ten thousand. I saw it far more distinctly than, as I drove along, I saw the frozen pastures and the shivering sheep.

Mrs. Smith had risen from her chair, and walked to the other side of the small room where she stood doing something — I did not know what — at a piece of furniture with drawers in it. I was not looking at her but at the man, and suddenly I found myself wondering what that was that I saw sticking up dimly visible out of his coat-tail pocket. As I wondered, I became aware that he was stealthily rising to his feet, and that his hand was cautiously travelling to his pocket in search of that very object which had arrested my attention. In another second, he had drawn it out — it was a revolver; had cocked it, aimed it at his mistress’s head and fired!

There was a thud, a horrible thud that I heard plainly even now as I drove along in my safe brougham, and I woke screaming so loudly that if anyone had been occupying a room near mine, they must have been awoke by the sound; but as it happened, nobody was. The girls were separated from me by a long passage, and the servants were in an entirely different region.

The dream had been so much more real than reality, that it must have been some minutes — it seemed to be hours — before my reason could assert itself enough to tell me which was which. I do not know how long it was before I at length summoned up resolution to strike a light, and, shaking with terror, so that I could hardly hold the candle to get out of bed and examine the room for some indication of what could have been the cause of that dread, dull noise, which I could by no possibility believe to have existed only in my imagination. I searched in vain. The windows were all securely fastened; the door bolted, as I had left it overnight. The pictures hung on the walls; there was no brick fallen from the chimney on the hearth; not even a handful of soot or a starling’s nest. Nothing, nothing anywhere.

I crept back to bed, still quivering in every nerve. I must make up my mind that the whole thing had been the work of my own fancy, preternaturally alive in sleep. Good Heavens! Could the power of any imagination be adequate to presenting to me with the astounding vividness mine had done the figure of that man, kneeling with his back to me by the fire and stealing a covert hand to that coat pocket. I shut my eyes. Still I saw him, and with such distinctness, I felt that if I put out my hand I must touch him. I lit another candle: the more light the better. Still I saw him. I hid my head under the clothes. Still I saw him. The cold sweat stood on my forehead. I lay in an agony till daybreak; and, when the reassuring light began to creep in, I became a little more able to summon to my aid such reason as I was master of, to correct the hitherto overwhelming influence of that grisly vision.

Several circumstances of improbability in the dream presented themselves with some reassurance to my mind. The murderer, as seen by me, had been a young man. Now, I happened accidentally to have learnt only lately that the Smiths possessed as butler an old family servant, who had lived with them over thirty years, and whom they were most unlikely to have parted with. Also, throughout the dream, I was conscious that, but for servants, Mrs. Smith and I were alone in the house. Now, only yesterday, one of the girls had casually mentioned meeting Mr. Smith in Leighton. As the light broadened I dwelt with more and more confidence on these discrepancies, and was able to go down to breakfast presenting such a distant resemblance to my usual self as I have described.

But when left to myself after breakfast, with nothing to distract my thoughts and no appearances of equanimity to keep up, the vision returned upon me with almost its first force.

Again I saw that kneeling figure, that stealthy rising, that travelling of the hand to the coat pocket. I heard the click of that cocked revolver! I could not bear it. It must mean something! I must go to her. Must warn her. As you know, I rang the bell to order the carriage. But in the interval before it was answered, the vision passed; reason, or what I supposed to be reason, re-asserted its sway, telling me how shadowy was the pretext upon which I was going to intrude upon this stranger; and how little my husband would thank me.

This same thing was repeated more than once; it was only Alice’s triumphant “That settles it!” which gave me the final impetus that enabled me to decide which of the two courses to adopt. Though, indeed, I thought I must have gone in any case, I could not get that man’s kneeling back from before my eyes. I could not have faced another night alone in the dark with it.

So now, reader, you know my reason for setting off at past three o’clock on a January afternoon, upon a twelve mile drive along a rutty road, with rising wind and thickening snow, to visit an almost entire stranger, whom my husband did not wish me to hold any communication with. Probably you think me as great a fool as the girls would have done, I was too much occupied with my own thoughts to notice the weather or the landscape much. I was worried with the stupid effort (which yet I could not help making) to recall that remark of Mrs. Smith’s which had immediately preceded the knock at the door in my dream. In vain; no glimmering of it would recur to me. I was still cudgelling on my restive memory for it, when my attention was awakened by the carriage stopping and the footman appearing at the window.

“If you please, the coachman is afraid he is not sure which of these roads he ought to take.”

I put my head out. We were at three cross roads.

“Why, there is a sign post!” said I, tartly. “Why do not you look at it?”

“If you please, the names are all rubbed out.”

Here the coachman leaned from his box to join in the conversation.

“The snow is coming on very thick, ma am; I doubt our getting to Longmains to-night.”

“At all events we will try,” replied I, with decision. “Go slowly along whichever road you think looks most likely, until you pass a cottage, or some inn at which you can ask.”

I was obeyed. We moved slowly in a dismal uncertainty for some way; in the waning light the figures of the two men, with their whitened hats and great-coats, grew indistinct. Then we stopped again. Praise Heaven, we had met someone! I let down the glass to look and listen. Yes, there was a whitened countryman standing in the snow, being questioned. He was deaf, apparently; and it was some time before he could be got to understand the drift of the interrogatory addressed to him.

When at length he did, I gathered from his words and gestures, as well as the wind would let me, the reassuring information that we had come wrong. And, as ill-luck would have it, the road had narrowed so much that we had to go on for some distance before finding a place wide enough to enable us to turn. So it must have been fully half-an-hour from the time of our first passing it, before we found ourselves once again at the finger-post: that blind leader of the blind. The dark had fully fallen before we found ourselves rolling noiselessly as snow could make us, over the cobble-stoned streets of a little country town.

“This must be Salcote,” said I to myself, “I know that Salcote is their town. Courage! We can’t be very far off now.”

Let no one holloa before they are out of the wood!

This thought had scarcely passed through my mind before I was conscious of a jolt, severer than any that the snow-wrapped pavement of Salcote could inflict; the carriage gave a sort of dip on one side; In an instant the horses were pulled up on their haunches; the footman off the box and holding the carriage door open.

“If you please, ma’am, you will have to get out, one of the wheels has come off.”

I did not need a second bidding. In an instant I was out, standing in the snow, and peering with the help of Salcote’s dim street gas at one of the hind wheels, in order to verify my servant’s words. They were but too true. It had come off. Fortunately, in so doing, it had fallen, inwards, instead of outwards, in which latter case the carriage must, of course, have been overturned. I stared stupidly at it. Was this a judgment on me for my pigheadedness? What was to be done?

“Which is the best inn in the town?” asked I, addressing generally a group of gapers, which, snowball-like, had gathered round me and my broken wheel. Half-a-dozen voices instantly cried “White Hart” — as many dirty fingers pointed up the street, to where, about a hundred yards off, I could faintly see an old-fashioned sign hanging out.

“I suppose,” said I, disconsolately to the coachman, who was already beginning to unfasten the traces, “that you will have to stay here for the night, I must go home in a fly.”

As I spoke, I set off to walk to the White Hart, which I reached in about two minutes.

“My carriage has broken down,” said I as I entered, addressing the civil woman — landlady, I suppose — who came to meet me. “I want a fly at once, please, as soon as it can be got ready. Have you one in; a good fly? I want a good fly at once, please,” repeating the words with an emphasis which I thought must impress them upon my hearer. She assured me that she had, though, from the length of time that had elapsed before it appeared, I have since felt certain she had not spoken the truth, but had to wait in hope of the return of some vehicle now conveying another fare, and of some poor tired horse, destined through me to be baulked of his hard-earned feed.

And as I sat waiting in the little inn parlour, my thoughts were not of the most complacent. Perhaps I had had enough of having my own will now! After all, I had better henceforth submit tamely to Alice’s rule. I was clearly not fit to rule myself. Into what a stupid quandary had I brought myself, guided only by the Will-o’-th’-Wisp of a senseless dream. Well, the only rational course now left me to adopt was to return home as quickly as possible, acknowledge my folly, submit, with what good humour I could muster, to the just laughter that folly would provoke, and resolve never to make such a fool of myself again. As I so resolved, a girl entered to poke the fire, and asked if I would like to take anything. I refused, and inquired how far they called it to Longmains.

“To Longmains, ma’am? About three miles, ma’am; not quite three miles, but it is not a good road.”

She left the room again. Only three miles! To have come so near, and then turn back! Should I not turn back? Should I go on? As I hesitated, again I saw that kneeling figure stealthily rising, with its backward travelling hand. I looked round with a shiver. I wished the girl would come in again; I wished that I was not alone in the room. I shut my eyes, and still before them was that kneeling figure.

I must go on! I would go on! At the same moment the landlady entered to tell me that a fly was at the door, and I followed her out. There it stood, with the horse’s head — it was a dispirited, disappointed head, poor beast — turned towards my own home, and the footman holding the door open. I got in.

“Home, ma’am?” asked he, touching his hat, and evidently in no doubt as to the answer.

“No,” said I, desperately; “to Longmains.”

For an instant he looked staggered, as if doubting his own ears, then prepared to get on the box.

“Stay,” said I, “you must not come with me; you must find your own way home and tell the young ladies not to be alarmed however late it may be before I return. And tell him to go on and drive as quick as he can.”

I was off; we clattered with a spurious briskness until we had left behind us the streets of the little town. Then we dropped into a tired crawl in which we continued. The horse was evidently all but done. Ah! but for me, he might have had his poor nose in his manger They certainly had not erred on the side of exaggeration who had told me that the road was not a good one. It was abominable. I was tossed up in the air and caught again a hundred times, like a cup and ball, by the monstrous ruts; the fly smelt rampantly of straw, and fust, and worm-eaten cloth; the piercing winds blew through it. If anyone in after time ever asked me what was the distance between Salcote and Longmains, I always answered thirty miles. And I really believed it.

At last, however, we stopped at a gate, the driver got down, there was no lodge, and after interminable fumbling he opened it, and we passed through. There were three more gates, at all of which he fumbled, so that when at last we drew up at a hall door I had the pleasure of hearing the hour of six told distinctly by several clocks within and without the house.

What an hour at which to call, with a twelve miles drive home afterwards! If a white-headed seneschal — obviously the confidential family servant of whom I had heard — appeared in answer to my ring, I would thrust in my card, and return whence I came, without asking to be admitted. I waited breathlessly. It was some time before anyone appeared. Who, indeed, would be expected to arrive at such an hour? At length there was a sound of steps, and of a turning handle. The door opened, and in the aperture appeared a man. Was he an old or a young one? I craned my head out feverishly to ascertain. Young, obviously young. But perhaps he was a footman. Again I stared feverishly out. No, he was not in livery. He was a butler and he was a young man.

SCENE III

Mrs. Smith’s was not a face upon which I imagine as a rule any emotion painted itself with much vividness. It was a dull, flat, mask-like face; but there was one feeling that upon my entry it showed itself at all events fully capable of portraying, and that was astonishment. I shall never forget the way in which her eyes and mouth opened as I sheepishly followed my own name into her drawing-room. She rose from a work-table at which she was sitting and advanced to meet me civilly enough, but all over her face was written such an obvious expectation of hearing from my lips some immediate explanation of this surprising visit, that not all the shock of the discovery that, in its first particular — that of the changed butler — my dream was fulfilled, could prevent my feeling covered with confusion at my own apparent intrusiveness.

“I am afraid this is rather a late hour at which to call,” said I, constrainedly — she tried to put in a faint disclaimer—“but the fact is I met with an accident on my way. My carriage broke down in Salcote—something went wrong with the axle-tree.”

“Indeed! I am very sorry.” Perfectly politely, but still with that undisguisable look of astonishment and expected explanation. It must be remembered that she had been living twelve years in the neighbourhood, and that I had made no slightest attempt to visit her before.

“And so I had to wait till a fly could be got ready, which threw me later still,” continued I, boldly.

She again repeated. “Indeed!” and that she was very sorry, adding that the Salcote flies were very bad ones. But I saw the puzzled look grow acuter, and I could follow the chain of thought that was running through her mind as plainly as if it had been written on a piece of paper before me. That my carriage should have broken down, and that yet I should have been so determinedly resolved to visit her as to push on in the teeth of circumstances in a mouldy fly at six o’clock at night, and on such a night, was the problem, her total inability to solve which she was perfectly unable to disguise, nor could I help her.

It was utterly impossible that I could tell her what motive had brought me. Had she been another kind of woman I might possibly have confessed myself to her; but being such as she was, I felt that I had sooner be torn in pieces by wild horses. As we were toilsomely trying to keep up a conversation, rendered almost impossible by our relative positions, the butler entered, bringing tea. As he set down the tray on the tea table, I could not help stealing a sidelong glance at his face. It told me nothing. I had never, to my knowlege, seen it before, nor was it one that I should ever have noticed. But, then, neither had I seen the dream-face. It had been unaccountably hidden from me. As soon as he had left the room, I said abruptly, “So you have lost your old butler.”

A fresh access of surprise overtook her, as I saw. How did I know that they had an old butler?

“Yes,” she answered, slowly; “we kept him as long as we could, poor old man, because we were so fond of him, but he grew so infirm at last that he had to go.”

“And your present one?”

“Our present one?” Repeating my words with a puzzled air.

“Yes; do you like him? Had you a very good character with him?”

Her eyes opened wide at my extraordinary curiosity.

“Well, I am afraid that we were a little imprudent in his case. I am sure it is very good of you to take an interest in the matter.” (“For good, read impertinent,” commented I, internally.) “But the fact is, that there seems to be a little mystery about the reason why he left his last place. However, Mr. Smith took a fancy to his appearance, and so we engaged him. But I do not know” — formally — “why I should trouble you with our domestic affairs.”

I did not answer for a moment I was thinking with a sort of stupefaction. They have taken him without a character! Who knows what his antecedents were? When I did speak it was with an apparently brusque change of subject. I myself knew the link that bound the two topics together in my mind.

“Mr. Smith is well, I hope; at home?”

“He was quite well when he left home this morning, thanks.”

“Left home!” interrupted I, breathlessly; “he has left home?”

“He was summoned away unexpectedly,” answered she, tranquilly; “but I expect him back to-morrow, or the day after, at latest.”

“But not to-night?” hurriedly.

“No, not to-night, certainly,” with her usual phlegm.

At that moment the butler again entered, bringing coals — apparently Longmains did not boast a footman — and knelt down before the fire to put them on.

For a moment my eye fell on him; then I turned suddenly sick. Surely that was the very back, the very kneeling figure altogether that I had seen in my dreams! I suppose I looked very odd, pale and faint; for I found Mrs. Smith’s white eyes fixed upon me, and her voice asking me, “Did I feel the fire too much?” I stammered out a negative, and for some moments could do no more. At last the object that had excited my emotion being no longer in the room, I rose, driven by some inward power stronger than myself, and went towards Mrs. Smith. She, thinking that I meant to take leave, rose too.

“I do not know whether your fly is at the door,” said she, “you had better let me ring and ask.”

Her hand was on its way to the bell, but I arrested it. She had misunderstood my action in rising. I had not meant to go yet. But now she was virtually dismissing me. I must leave her. What pretext had I for further intrusion? I had come twelve miles in the teeth of circumstances; I had seen and spoken with her, and now I was to leave her. What object had I then served by my wild freak? I had not warned her; I had given her no slightest hint of the peril that to my excited imagination seemed to hang imminently over her. I had been of no least service to her and now I was leaving her — leaving her to her fate.

It was impossible! It was equally impossible that I should expose myself to her more than probable ridicule by telling her what had brought me! I embraced a desperate resolution. I still held her hand, which I had seized to prevent her ringing the bell. I was so agitated that I was hardly aware that it was in my clasp, until her face of profound astonishment, almost alarm, betrayed the fact to me.

“I do not know what you will think of me,” said I, in a shaking voice; “but I’m going to make what I am afraid you will think a very extraordinary request to you.”

“Indeed!” said she, with a perceptible accent of distrust and a decided drawing away of the hand so convulsively clasped by me.

“Yes,” said I, going on with feverish haste, now that the ice was once broken, “you see it has happened so unfortunately, the distance was greater than I expected, and then the axle-tree breaking, and the poor fly-horse is so done that I am sure he could not crawl another mile; in short, I am afraid I must throw myself upon your hospitality, and ask you to give me shelter; to let me stay here for the night.”

Out it had come, and now it only remained to be seen bow she would take my proposition. At first she was too dumb-foundered to utter. I saw at once that the idea of my being deranged crossed her mind; for she looked hard at, and at the same time backed away from me. Then her civility revived.

“Of course!” she said, “of course, I shall be only too delighted!” and then she stopped again.

I saw that, having gained my point, my next task was to convince her of my sanity. I, therefore, with profuse thanks and apologies, and as composed a voice as I could master, asked leave to send my orders by the flyman back to my coachman at Salcote. I took care that she should hear me give them myself to the man, so that she might know that the broken axle-tree and disabled brougham were not figments of my own diseased imagination. But I do not think that this measure had much effect in removing the suspicion of my insanity from my hostess’s mind. I had gone out to the hall door to speak to the flyman, whence we both returned to the drawing-room to begin our sixteen or eighteen hours tête-à-tête.

I think that both our hearts sank to our boots at the prospect. I am sure that mine did. In order, perhaps, to abridge it as much as possible, Mrs. Smith soon left me, with some murmured sentence about seeing that my room was comfortable, which it certainly was not. It was, on the contrary, as I found on being led to it, as uncomfortable as a hastily got-ready bedroom, with a just-lit fire, and a sensation of not having been occupied for some indefinite time past, would naturally be on a biting January night.

Having taken off my bonnet, and made myself as tidy as I could with the aid of Mrs. Smith’s brush and comb, and told myself repeatedly that the world had never seen such a fool as me, and that neither the girls nor my husband would ever forgive me, I went downstairs, and we presently betook ourselves to dinner. There we sat opposite to each other in tête-à-tête, I had faintly hoped that some female friend, old governess, or cousin might crop up to make a third with us. But no; there we were, we two! We were waited on by the butler, and by him alone.

By questions, whose impertinence Mrs. Smith must have thought only palliated by the unsound state of my mind, I ascertained that the Smith establishment in its normal state consisted of butler and footman, but that the footman had, two days ago, been suddenly taken ill and sent home. The butler was therefore now, in his master’s absence, the only man in the house. I also ascertained, during one of his absences from the room, that the stables were at an inconveniently long distance from the house, and that there was no cottage nearer than a quarter of a mile off. Altogether, as lonely a spot as you would wish to see. My eyes travelled uncomfortably and furtively after the man on his return into the room, but I could see nothing in his appearance to justify my terrors. His face had no specially sinister cast It was almost as insignificant as his mistress’s. And his figure! Could it be possible that the startling resemblance I had traced in it to my dream-figure was only the figment of my horrified fancy?

But no! no! a hundred times no! As I watched the butler, in precisely the same furtively apprehensive way, I was conscious that Mrs. Smith was watching me. Her slow brain had adopted and clung fast to the belief that I was mad; nor, indeed, was that conviction devoid of a good deal of justification. I think that she would not have been at all surprised if I had at any moment risen, and playfully buried the carving-knife in her breast. I have often thought since what a pleasant dinner she must have had. It was over at last It had seemed enormously long, and yet on our return to the drawing-room it proved to have been disastrously short; short as women’s dinners always are. We had dined at eight, and it was only five-and-twenty minutes to nine. Three hours and five-and-twenty minutes until the period indicated in my dream.

We sat down dejectedly on each side of the fire. I noticed, almost with a smile, that Mrs. Smith took care not to place herself too near me. We had long exhausted our few poor topics of common talk. I had not even any more impertinent questions to ask. It is true that after having run, as we both thought, quite dry already, we had had the good fortune to happen upon a common acquaintance. Very slightly as she was known to either of us, with what tenacity did we cleave to that poor woman! How we dissected her character; anatomised her clothes; criticised her actions; enumerated her vices; speculated on her motives; about none or all of which we either of us knew or cared a button.

But at last she was picked to the bone, and bare naked silence stared us in the face. What a dreadful evening it was; saved, to me at least, from the simplicity of bottomless tedium by alternate rushes of burning shame and icy apprehension. At ten o’clock Mrs. Smith could bear it no longer. She rose and rang for candles.

“I dare say that you will not be sorry to go to bed,” she said, a sort of relief coming into her tone.

I believe she nourished a secret intention of locking me into my room when once she had got me there.

“After your long drive you will be glad of rest.”

“And will you too?” asked I, stupidly, for she had had no long drive. “I mean are you also going to bed?” She hesitated.

“It would not be much use my going to bed so early; I am a bad sleeper.”

“You are not going to bed, then?”

“Not just yet.”

“You are going to stay here — in this room, I mean?”

“No, I am going to my boudoir.”

A cold shiver ran down me. Her boudoir! That was the room we were sitting in in my dream. There was a moment’s pause.

“I wonder,” said I, with a nervous laugh, and in a voice whose agitation I could but partially control, “whether you would let me come with you. I — I — am not at all sleepy, after all; it — it is so very early, is not it? I — I — should like to see your boudoir, may I?”

Polite a woman as Mrs. Smith was, and had proved herself to be to-night, she could not prevent a flash of acute annoyance, mixed, as I saw, with fear, from crossing her face.

“It really is not at all worth seeing,” replied she, stiffly; “and I cannot help thinking that you look tired.”

“But I am not, at all,” rejoined I, obstinately. “I should like to come with you, if you would let me.”

“Of course, if you wish it,” said she, grudgingly.

Before finally succumbing, she made one or two more efforts to shake me off. In vain! I was quite immovable. I heard her give an irrepressible sigh of impatience and apprehension at my unaccountable and offensive pertinacity as she preceded me upstairs. We reached her boudoir. It was a common-place room, common-placely arranged. I had seen hundreds like it, but never to my knowledge, either in waking or sleeping, had my eyes made acquaintance with it before. I looked at once upon entering to see whether the relative position of door and fire-place were the same as those seen in my dream, and also whether there was a clock on the chimney-piece. In both particulars my vision had told me correctly. But, after all, there was nothing very remarkable in this. Most rooms boast a clock, and in many the door is on the left hand of the fire-place. But, to me, it seemed confirmation strong as Holy Writ.

“I told you that there was nothing to see here,” said my hostess, noting my eye wandering round, and speaking in a tone out of which she could not keep all the resentment she felt.

“But it — it is very — very comfortable!” rejoined I hastily, fearing that this was the prelude to a curt dismissal of me. “I should like to stay here a bit with you, if I might.”

She made some sort of murmured sound, which might mean acquiescence, and we sat down. This time we did not even attempt any conversation. She occupied herself with some work that apparently required a great deal of counting; and I — I had no other occupation but my thoughts. I could not well have had a worse one. As I sat there, in silence, listening with ears continually strained to catch some sound that was not swallowed up in the shutter-shaking of the storm-wind, with eyes perpetually travelling to the clock-face, I asked myself over and over again what purpose I hoped to serve, by this apparently so insane procedure of mine?

Were the dream to prove a fallacy, I had made as great a fool of myself as the world — fertile in that product — had ever seen. If, on the other hand, the dream, hitherto proved curiously true in some slight particulars, were to be carried out in its terrible main features, of what avail could I suppose my presence to be in averting the catastrophe with which it concluded. All I had done was to involve myself in Mrs. Smith’s fate, which there could be no doubt about my sharing.

Again that cold shudder ran over me. I could not help breaking the silence to ask my companion whether she never felt it “a little eerie, sitting up here all alone so late at night?”

She answered briefly, “I am not nervous.”

“Do you never even take the precaution of locking the door?” asked I, glancing nervously towards it.

She smiled rather contemptuously.

“Never; and even if I wished I should be unable,” as I see what I never noticed before, that the lock is broken.

The clock struck eleven. One hour more! It passed, too, that last hour. It was endless, an eternity, yet it rushed. As it drew towards its last sands I hardly breathed. If Mrs. Smith had once looked up from the stitching at which she was so tranquilly pegging away, she must have seen the agitation under which I was labouring, and would of course have at once assigned it to her old count of insanity. I wondered that she did not hear the thundering of my heart, pulsing so loudly as to impede that intensity of listening into which all my powers seemed to have passed.

How near it was growing! Five minutes, four minutes, three minutes. two minutes, one minute. I held my breath. I clenched my hands till the nails dug into the palms. Twelve The clock struck! With that ringing in my head, with that hammering heart, should I hear the knock, even if it came? Mrs. Smith made some slight movement, and I almost shrieked, but I bit in the scream, and listened again. One minute past; two minutes past; three; four; up to twelve The clock said twelve minutes past twelve. As each minute went by, I drew a longer breath, and my tense nerves slackened. At the twelve minutes past Mrs. Smith looked up —

“Do you feel inclined to go to bed yet?” she enquired. “I am afraid” (looking more attentively at me) “that you are more tired than you will allow.”

“I think I will go,” said I, rising and drawing a long breath; “it is ten minutes past twelve.”

“Not quite that,” rejoined she; “that clock is ten minutes fast. I must have it regulated to-morrow.”

“I must have it regulated to-morrow!” Like lightning it flashed upon me that that was the speech Mrs. Smith had made in my dream immediately before the knock came. The speech I had made such vain efforts to recall. And, as panic-struck, this dawned upon me, someone knocked. A mist swam before my eyes. I tried to speak, but no words would come, and Mrs. Smith apparently did not see the agonised hand I stretched out towards her.

“Come in,” she said, phlegmatically.

The door opened, and in the aperture appeared the figure of the butler, with a coal-box in his hand. My horror-struck eyes were rivetted on him, but I could not stir hand or foot. To what purpose if I had? Were not we alone in the house with him — we two wretched, defenceless women?

Mrs. Smith had, as in my dream, moved to the other side of the room, to the piece of furniture with drawers at which I had seen her standing. Then she looked over her shoulder and said, composedly, “Thank you, Harris; we do not want any more coal to-night.” Then, as he seemed, or seemed to me, to hesitate, she added quietly, “I shall not require anything more to-night; you may go to bed.”

Could I believe my eyes? Was he really retreating; shutting the door after him? Were those his footsteps, whose lessening sound I heard along the passage? For a moment everything grew dark before me. I clutched the arms of my chair, to assure myself that this was reality and no dream. Then I staggered to my feet, and towards Mrs. Smith.

“Is he gone?” asked I, in a hoarse whisper.

“Gone!” repeated she, in astonishment, all her old doubts as to my soundness of mind rushing back in flood. “Yes, of course he is gone! Why not?”

“And he will not come back?” still in that husky whisper.

“Of course not. I told him I needed nothing more to-night. I think” — eyeing me distressfully — “that you really had better go to bed; you seem a little — a little — feverish!”

“Yes,” said I, making an effort to recover some decent amount of composure, “perhaps I am; I will go to bed if you are quite — quite sure —”

She looked so really alarmed at my manner and words that I did not finish my sentence. I followed her, still shaking in every limb, to my bed-room, when she left me; and into which, I am almost certain, though she tried to do it as noiselessly as possible, that she locked me. For hours after she left me I remained, sunk in the armchair by the fire, into which I had almost fallen on entering. I still shook as if ague-struck, and every now and again I held my breath to listen — to listen for that stealthy step which even now I felt must come; — for the noise of that awful thud which still sounded so loudly in the ears of my imagination that I could not even yet believe that it neither had, nor ever would have, any echo in a real sound.

At length I dropped into an uneasy doze, from which I was awoke by a sensation of extreme cold, to find the fire black out and the temperature of the room at or below freezing point. I rose and threw myself, dressed, upon the bed, and, wrapping myself in a fur cloak, fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was only roused by the eight o’clock entry of the housemaid.

On first opening my bewildered eyes I could not recollect where I was, but stared round wonderingly at the unfamiliar room. Then recollection came upon me with a rush, and I buried my face in the pillow. Oh, why had I ever woke again? Why had day ever had the inhumanity to dawn again upon such a candidate for Earlswood? As the details of the previous day’s incidents came back upon me with brutal vividness, I called to the rocks to fall upon me and the mountains to cover me!

Had anyone since the world first began, ever written themselves down so egregious an ass? Befooled by an idiotic dream; misled by a fancied resemblance of trivial circumstances . floundering deeper and deeper into the quagmire of unreason, which had landed me at last, fully dressed, on this strange bed, and with the appalling prospect before me of having to go down and meet Mrs. Smith at breakfast.

She would probably and wisely meet me with a lunatic asylum-keeper and a strait waistcoat. And my children, my servants, my husband, how should I ever look any one of them in the face again? I writhed. But writhing did not help me. I had seen the housemaid’s astonished glance at my full-dressed condition, a fresh proof of my insanity, which would, no doubt, be conveyed to Mrs. Smith.

I must get up. I must go down and appear as soon as I could. That was all that was now left me. And that much I did. With what inward grovelling, mentally though not apparently on all fours, I entered that dining-room will never be known save only to myself. She came to meet me, civil, dull, unemotional; though I thought I caught a look of lurking apprehension still in her eye.

Stupid woman! Why could not she have been shot through the head, and fallen with that thud I had expected of her? I felt a sort of anger against her for standing there so stolid and sound after having wrought me such irremediable woe.

Oh, that breakfast! Shall I ever forget it? How did I live through it; through it and the moments that followed it, and the leave-taking? At the latter I do not think that I said anything. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth. I had just sense left to give her my hand stupidly, and to notice the look of scarcely subdued joy and relief on her face at seeing the last of me.

She sent me in her carriage as far as Salcote, which I thought she looked upon as the surest method of being rid of me. At Salcote I got into my own brougham, and returned home a sadder, if not a wiser, woman. Reader, will you despise me very much if I tell you that I cried the whole way, and that on reaching my own fireside I gathered my children about me and made a clear breast of my folly to them? They took my confession characteristically. Alice said that if I had taken her advice I should have been spared a great annoyance.

Ruth said that all dreams were nonsense, and reverted to her own puerile one, which even at that moment of humiliation I felt wounded at having paralleled with mine.

And Sue, dear Sue, held both my hands fast in hers, and said she should have done precisely the same in my case.

But I refused to be comforted, the more so as it turned out that the most valuable of the carriage horses had caught in the cold White Hart stables an influenza which was rapidly developing into inflammation of the lungs. But even without that final straw I had sunk hopelessly in my own esteem.

POSTSCRIPT.

Just a year later the public was shocked by the account of a murder which, in its circumstances, exceeded the measure of brutality usually connected with such crimes.

It was the murder of a lonely old maiden lady by her butler — a butler to whom, as it appeared, she had been in the habit of showing exceptional kindness.

I read the account with about the same degree of shuddering disgust, I suppose, as my neighbours; but without any feeling of a personal character until it transpired, in the course of the evidence, that the murderer’s name was Harris — a name by which I had once, and once only, heard Mrs. Smith of Longmains address her butler.

I dismissed the thought at once as far as I was able. Had not I had enough of giving the reins to my imagination? Was not Harris an extremely common name, almost as common as Smith? But when the trial came on, which, as the crime had been committed shortly before the Assizes, it did very soon after the committal to prison, I, perhaps, unknown almost to myself, followed it with a keener interest than, but for this trifling circumstance, I should have done.

The trial was a short one; the evidence overwhelming; the man found guilty, condemned and executed, without any sentimentalist being found to petition the Home Secretary in his favour.

On the evening before his execution he made to the Gaol Chaplain a full confession of his crime; and not only of that one which brought him to the gallows, but of a previous one which he had been prevented from carrying beyond the stage of intention by a curious accident. What that curious accident was you shall hear, and judge of my feelings on reading the following extract from the murderer’s confession:

“In January of last year, I was living in the service of Mr. Smith of Longmains. I was at very low water at the time, over head and ears in debt, and did not know where to turn for money, which I wanted desperately and felt that I must obtain by fair means or foul. My chief inducement for entering Mr. Smith’s service had been that I had accidentally heard that he was in the habit of keeping considerable sums of money in the house, for the purpose of paying the weekly wages of the workmen employed upon some extensive drainage works which he had undertaken.

“I thought, on reaching Longmains, that I had never seen a house better adapted to my purpose. It was as lonely a spot as I have ever seen; the stables at an unusual distance from the hall, and no dwelling-house within less than a quarter of a mile. The establishment consisted, as to men, of myself and one footman; but about a week after my arrival the footman fell ill, and had to be sent home.

“I had not yet matured my plans, though I had ascertained that Mr. Smith kept his money in a strong-box in his business room, and that in the case of his absence, Mrs. Smith had charge of the key, when one morning my master was unexpectedly summoned from home, leaving me alone with my mistress and the female servants in the house.

“Such an opportunity, which, very probably, might not soon occur again, was, I felt, not to be lost. Mrs. Smith’s habits were such as to favour my project. She usually sat in her boudoir, situated in a rather isolated part of the house, until late at night. I made up my mind to wait until the rest of the household had retired, and then to go to Mrs. Smith’s boudoir on the pretext of taking coals for the fire, obtain from her the key of the strong-box, by fair means if possible; but if she resisted — and she was a resolute woman — I had determined to shoot her through the head, having provided myself with a revolver for the purpose; furnish myself with as much money as I could get hold of, and make tracks for America. I was prevented from carrying out this intention by a very unlooked for accident.

“Late in the afternoon of that day — the weather was extremely bad, snowing hard, with a high wind and bitter cold — a lady arrived in a fly to call on my mistress. I could see that my mistress was greatly surprised when I took in the lady’s card; for, as far as I could make out, she was very slightly acquainted with her and lived a matter of twenty miles off.

“I have never to this day made out why she came. We ail thought she was off her head, and I believe she was. My mistress certainly thought so, all the more when she asked leave to stay the night. I could see that my mistress was very much annoyed, and rather alarmed, but as the lady would not go, there was no help for it; stay she must.

I was a good deal upset at first, as I was afraid her being there would knock my plan on the head, but afterwards I comforted myself with the thought that she would be sure to go to bed early, tired with her long drive, and I should find Mrs. Smith alone in her boudoir.

“I lit them their bedroom candles in the drawing-room at ten, and then went off to wait. I would not risk it till twelve. By that time everyone would be sure to be in bed and asleep. I thought I never had known time go so slowly, but at last the clock pointed to five minutes to twelve. I put my revolver in my pocket, took up the coal-box, went up stairs, and knocked. Mrs. Smith’s voice said ‘Come in,’ and I opened the door.

“What was my horror to find the strange lady still sitting there with my mistress? The sight of her took me so aback that I did not know whether to come in or not, and as I was hesitating, Mrs. Smith said, ‘We do not want any more coals; you may go to bed, Harris,’ or something like that. And all the while the strange lady was staring at me so oddly, as white as a ghost, that I began to think she must have somehow found out what I was after. Her being there and her looking at me like that, altogether made me feel so queer that I actually shut the door and went away again. I thought I would put it off till next night. But on the following day Mr. Smith returned, and I never had another chance!”

I had no sooner reached this last word than I rose to my feet. I was certainly a yard taller than when I sat down.

“Girls!” said I, calling to them in a voice of solemn authority, and as they gathered round, “Be so good as to read those paragraphs,” pointing to them with my finger. I watched their faces as they did so, and when they had finished, I said, turning to Alice, in a voice of more than mortal dignity, “You see that wisdom is justified of her child!”

I was interrupted by the door opening and a lady rushing past the footman to precipitate herself into my arms. It was Mrs. Smith of Longmains come to thank me for having saved her life, and to apologise with tears for having ever thought me ripe for Bedlam.

His Serene Highness

(1894)

“It must be true, for His Serene Highness told me so himself.”

His Serene Highness! We were all a little awed. An unfledged and rustic band, in the case of most of us but lately freed from educational trammels, the idea of one of ourselves having had intimate communications made to them by a crowned head, or, at the very least, a crowned head’s second cousin, filled us with a pleasing stupefaction, and stemmed our usually voluble utterance. His Serene Highness!

“I forget whether I mentioned” (we had not forgotten) “that when I was in London last week I met Prince Waldemar of Saxe Thür, at dinner.” Our narrator, to do her justice, had tried to make her voice as colourless and matter of fact as possible; but the glory of the related fact blazed through it.

“Yes?” in several keys of acute interest.

“Of course I was not near him at dinner” (with a slight disclaiming laugh); “but in the evening he asked that I might be presented to him.”

“What fun for you!”

“And the story? How did it come about?”

“Some one was relating an odd incident, and the Prince said, ‘I had a very curious experience once.’”

“Does he speak English?”

“Of course he does!” (almost indignantly); “as well as, if not better than, you or I, only that he rolls his r’s as they all do.”

“As all who do? Do all royalties roll their r’s?”

“Oh! I do not know. At all events, all Germans roll their r’s.”

“Well?”

“Oh, then of course our hostess asked him whether he would be so kind as to relate the experience he spoke of.”

“And he did?”

“Oh yes, at once; he did not make the least difficulty; he was so good-natured about it.”

“I daresay, like the rest of us, he enjoyed talking about himself.”

“He began by saying, ‘You must remember that I am rather credulous about the supernatural,’ and then he laughed. He has such beautiful teeth!”

“That was not a bad sentence for showing off his r’s.”

“He went on to say, ‘My sisters ridicule me for it.’”

“He has sisters, then?”

“Yes; I looked them out in the Almanack de Gotha: there are three—Olga, Amalia, and Walpurga; but I think Walpurga died when she was a baby.”

“Yes?”

“‘My sisters ridicule me for it; they are esprits forts’”

“Esprits forts! All of them?”

“There are only two: don’t I tell you that Walpurga died when she was a baby?”

“Well?”

“I was so afraid that he would be prevented from finishing it, because people kept coming in and expecting to be presented to him. Lady ——— said she was only going to have ‘a small tail,’ but it ended by being a crush.”

“Did not he get out of patience?”

“Not in the least! Royalties never get out of patience: it is part of their education; he took the story up every time just where he had left off; only once his memory failed him for a moment, and then I came to the rescue.”

“You?”

“Yes, I. And thenceforward he—unless it was my fancy—addressed himself specially to me. I suppose he saw that I was more genuinely interested than any of his other listeners; he must have seen that they listened out of politeness, I because I was really impressed by the story; I should have been equally so if it had been told me by a tinker.”

“Well?”

“Twenty years ago Prince Waldemar was in the army.”

“Twenty years! Then he cannot be in his first youth?”

“He was in an Uhlan regiment, and had been in the service a year or two—I think he must have joined in ’70, just before the declaration of war—when his regiment was ordered to a remote village in Bavaria.”

“Yes?”

“It was not a place where troops were generally quartered; his Uhlans and a regiment, or detachment of a regiment, of infantry were sent there because there either had been some rioting, or there was an apprehension of likely disturbance—I did not quite make out which—in the neighbourhood. There were no barracks, and the soldiers had to be billeted on the inhabitants. Of course the local Gast Höfe were not nearly big enough to contain them, so every private house—they were mostly very humble ones—was saddled with two or three.”

“And was the Prince billeted, too?”

“Well, no; not exactly. Of course, though he was supposed to be serving on precisely the same terms as any of his brother officers, yet no doubt his Colonel was anxious that he should have a few little extra luxuries. He did not tell me so, but I gathered it.”

“I daresay that he thought a little roughing it rather fun than otherwise?”

“Perhaps so. German life is always much simpler than ours; even, I fancy, in royal circles. But still he owned that his heart sank a little on the very raw spring evening when he rode up to his quarters; and he could not help exclaiming to his equerry, in German of course, ‘What a God-forsaken hole!’”

“What is ‘God-forsaken’ in German?”

“I have not the least idea, and what does that matter? The equerry answered, ‘That it is, sir; but it is the best which, under the circumstances, could be procured for your Highness.’”

“Well?”

“So then Prince Waldemar just shrugged his shoulders, as he did in telling me, and said, ‘Then we must make the best of it.’ As he explained, ‘I saw there was no use in grumbling; and I am a philosopher; I never grumble when there is no use.’”

“Did he describe it—the house, I mean?”

“Yes, he said it was a newish house, not more than ten years old at most, yet already falling into decay; the plaster was tumbling off the front, and there were livid green patches of damp here and there; some of the outside shutters were broken off and swinging loose.”

“I should personally have much preferred to be billeted.”

“It had evidently been intended to form one of a row, as the projecting brick ends at one side showed; but the rest of the row had remained unbuilt; and there it stood, forlorn and alone.”

“Were there houses opposite it?”

“No, it was on a waste piece of ground covered with rubbish heaps; where the neighbours were evidently in the habit of shooting their old tin kettles and broken crockery, and tufts of rank grass and nettles grew between.”

“They might have pulled up the nettles, and mended his shutters for him!”

“So one would have thought; but you see the whole thing happened quite suddenly, the troops were sent to the village at a moment’s notice, having been telegraphed for by the civil authorities of the district.”

“And did the inside match the outside?”

“Very nearly. Some hasty attempts had been made to give it a habitable look; a few chairs and tables sent in, and a carpet or two put down, and the windows had evidently been newly glazed here and there, which showed, as indeed the Prince soon learned upon inquiry, that the house had stood empty and desolate for several months.”

One of the audience shrugged her shoulders. “For my part, I should have taken French leave.”

“Well, he did not. He got off his horse, and followed by his equerry, entered the house I have described.”

“Well?”

“His own confidential valet had of course been sent on beforehand, but the whole thing had happened so suddenly that he had arrived scarcely more than an hour before his master, and had not had time to get the loutish country servants, who had been hastily sent in, into any serviceable shape; and though big fires were burning all over the house, the whole place struck as chill as a vault on entering. ‘You know,’ Prince Waldemar said, ‘I have already told you that I am terribly superstitious; and it appeared to me as if a breath from the grave met me on the threshold.’”

“Ugh!”

“The blazing fires had been too lately lit to be able to overcome the penetrating feeling of intense and long-established damp, and though the March wind outside was shrewish and keen, it seemed warm and amiable compared to the temperature inside.”

“I should have swallowed my dignity and joined the troopers at the pot-house.”

“I suppose he could not well do that; at all events he did not.”

“Was it a large house or a small one?”

“Oh, small; but though small, it had none of the snugness which people associate with a cottage; but that was in great part due, no doubt, to its having been uninhabited through what had been a severe winter; and after all it was only for a very short time that it was to be occupied by him. He said all this to his equerry; and they both grew quite cheerful in laughing over the shifts they were driven to, and recalling to each other’s memory to what far worse hardships they had often to submit in their conquering march through wintry France. But it is a truism that great woes and privations are very much more easily borne with dignity than small ones; and he acknowledged that when he returned at night to his dismal abode, after having dined at mess with his brother officers in an uncomfortable shed, ill adapted for the purpose to which it was forced, he was, as he told me, ‘in what you call a devil of a temper’; he made the confession with such an angelic smile that one felt it could not possibly be true. ‘Poor Von Hammerstein!’ he added, beginning to laugh, ‘you had better ask him what sort of a memory he has of our first night at ———.’”

“Was Von Hammerstein at the party too?”

“Oh no; I imagine he is dead!”

“He can’t be dead if the Prince advised you to ask him a question!”

“No more he can. Well, anyhow, he was not there.”

“No?”

“So the Prince went to bed grumbling a good deal; went to bed rather early, as there was certainly nothing to tempt him to stay up late.”

A laugh. “According to your description of his surroundings, certainly not.”

“The house was three stories high; and there were three rooms on each floor; so, you see, there were twelve in all, besides the basement. The Prince’s bedroom—of course they had given him the best one—was the front one on the second floor; his equerry slept next door to him, the rooms opening out of each other; and the valet in the third; the other servants were above, the sitting-rooms below; and on the ground floor, in addition to two dining-rooms—front and back—was a small, dingy room, quite unfurnished, scarcely more than a closet, which had probably, when the house was occupied, been used as a passage to the weed-and-brickbat-grown back yard, which might once have done duty as a garden. This last room had a glass door, opening out on the forlorn plot of ground. It was not till the next day that Prince Waldemar became aware of the existence of the empty room, or rather, as I have said, closet, by seeing its door—not the outer glass one, but the one that opened inwards into the house—left accidentally ajar. He passed through it by the glass door into the garden, and, looking up at the dismal, sordid exterior of the building, fell to wondering over his cigar, as he told me, upon the problem of how life could ever have been endured by any inhabitant of such a spot.”

“That was next morning, you say. Then” (in a tone of slight disappointment) “nothing at all happened that first night?”

“Have I ever said that anything happened any night?”

“Well?”

“The Prince is, I imagine, never a very good sleeper; and though he looks so robust and muscular, has—he told us so—a highly-strung nerve system, and on this particular night he did not sleep at all. The odd thing was that there was no apparent cause for his wakefulness, no great discomfort, no noise. The house stood on the outskirts of the village, and even had it been in the middle of it, the little place’s sounds were hushed by midnight, all the soldiers, who earlier had given it unwonted life, having betaken themselves to their billets; but yet he could not close an eye until very near morning, and he seemed scarcely to have lost consciousness before it was sharply summoned back again by the bugles from the little village Platz blowing the ‘Reveillé,’ or whatever is the German equivalent to it. He woke quite unrefreshed, and with a heavy feeling of inertness and want of spring. This went off in the course of the morning, or he forgot to think about it as he was riding about all day with his troop, who were sent to awe by their presence, or, if need were, to coerce into submission those outlying hamlets, where the inclination to riot, the bent towards burning ricks and breaking windows had been most pronounced. Happily the mere presence of the clattering Uhlans had sufficed for the repression, at least momentary, of the revolutionary spirit; and Prince Waldemar and his troop returned at evening to their Dorf, without having been obliged to oppose anything but the sight of their swords to the pitchfork-bearing peasants, against whom they had been sent. But though quite bloodless, the day’s ride had been a long and tiring one, covering a very considerable mileage, and occupying many hours; and, after his previous wakeful night, the Prince felt quite ready to turn in at an even earlier hour than he had done the evening before; and he felt, up to the moment of going to bed, so heavy with sleep that the idea, as he said, never once struck him that he would not fall at once into a profound slumber, out of which even the unwelcome ‘Reveillé’ would be powerless to rouse him.”

“I foresee that he is not going to get a wink of sleep.”

“Then you are wrong. He did fall asleep the moment he was between the sheets; but only to find his eyes wide open again, after what seemed a very short interval. He looked at his watch—he always has a light burning in his room—and found that he had slept just three-quarters of an hour. However, short as that allowance of sleep was, he was obliged to content himself with it, since, beyond a few dozes each of five or ten minutes duration, he got no more. He was very much puzzled, and rather annoyed; tossed about impatiently enough, smoked a cigar, read a page or two, took several turns about the room, held his hands for several minutes in a basin of cold water, which he had heard of as a remedy for wakefulness; but all in vain. On this occasion the bugles had not the trouble of waking him, for he was broad awake already. He compared notes with Von Hammerstein, and also with his valet, as to the way in which they had passed the night, and from both of them elicited the acknowledgment of having slept ill and disturbedly, but not of the absolute wakefulness he himself had suffered from. He felt the effect of his unwilling vigil all through the day, which was again one of hard riding and fatigue; and when it was followed by a third night, if possible, more sleepless than its predecessors, he began to feel quite ill, feverish with loss of appetite.”

“Royalties generally have good appetites!”

“With loss of appetite and heaviness in the limbs; he felt as if he could barely drag himself on to his horse.”

“No doubt Von Hammerstein and the valet felt quite as bad, only they said nothing.”

“He said, ‘I am afr-raid I am always rather highly str-rung, and you will laugh at me, but my nerves were in r-ribbons.’ To add to his discomfort, he found on this third morning that his favourite charger, Porthos—he had christened him after one of the ‘Trois Mousquetaires,’ as, though he is a German, he adores Dumas—had fallen seriously ill with inflammation of the lungs.”

“Poor Porthos! I hope he did not die like the murdered Athos of that arch-devilish long distance ride?”

“I do not think he did.”

“Well?”

“As the day went on the Prince felt so increasingly ill that the Colonel, noticing his pale looks, and no doubt nervous about so great a personage, ordered him, or requested him—I do not know which form of speech a Colonel would employ to a royal subordinate—back to his quarters, and begged him to go to bed and send for the doctor.”

“If he is as nervous as you say, I daresay he did not need much persuading.”

“He took half the Colonel’s advice; he did not go back to bed, as his three nuits blanches had given him a horror of it, but he sent for the doctor.”

“The regimental one, of course?”

“No; for some reason which he did not explain to me, it was not the regimental doctor; it was a local practitioner, who, on first arriving, was so overwhelmed with the honour of prescribing for a prince, that for a few moments he was incapable of articulating, but presently, reassured by Prince Waldemar’s charm of manner—”

“Did Prince Waldemar say so?”

“Of course not; but I read it between the lines. He has a great charm of manner—the sincerity which comes from a really good heart; and no doubt the poor apothecary soon found it out, and plucked up courage to take His Serene Highness’ temperature, and go through the usual little medical manoeuvres. He was able to assure the Prince that there was not much the matter with him; and after prescribing bromide to quiet his nerves, and one or two other simple medicines, was awkwardly going to take leave, trying to back out of the room, and tumbling over his own obsequious legs in the attempt, when the Prince called him back. ‘Do not be in such a hurry, Herr Doktor, unless you are hastening away to some very urgent case. I should be glad to ask you a few questions about this house, where perhaps I may be compelled to make a longer stay than I at first supposed, as’ (laughing) ‘from their manners towards us your peasants do not seem in any hurry to let us go.’ Indeed, the mutinous spirit in the district showed as yet no sign of calming down. The. doctor came back at once, and stood as nervously awaiting the queries about to be put to him as if they referred to his own complicity in some crime. ‘I want you to be so good as to tell me, Herr Doktor, what you know about this house, which seems to me, and also to Herr Von Hammerstein, to have something very odd and unheimlich about it.’

“‘Indeed, Your Serene Highness, I know very little about the house; I should be delighted to give Your Serene Highness any information in my power, but I am but a newcomer in the village; I know nothing of the house, except that ever since I have lived here it has stood empty.’

“‘H’m! Do you know any reason why it should have remained unoccupied, since it is the best house as to size in the place?’

“‘No reason whatever, Your Serene Highness—that is to say, no rational reason—but, as Your Serene Highness knows far better than I do, no doubt there is an immense mass of degrading superstition still lurking in remote country places such as this is; and I have reason to believe that the real cause of this excellent residence having remained uninhabited is that our poor benighted people have a prejudice against it because it is built on the site of a disused churchyard.’

“The Prince says that he knows that here he gave a start: you see, he had not yet taken the bromide, and his nerves were still jumpy. ‘A disused churchyard!’ he cried; ‘but surely, surely that must be very unhealthy! The sanitary arrangements—the drains—’

“‘I think that Your Serene Highness need have no alarm on that score; the burial-ground had been disused for over three centuries, and the ground had lain waste and idle, only a tradition remaining that it had once been consecrated.’

“‘It has certainly not proved a Fried Hof to me!’ interjected the Prince, making a rather rueful pun on the German name for churchyard.

“The doctor laughed nervously; then checked himself suddenly, as if not quite sure how far it was etiquette to show amusement at a royal jest. ‘About four or five years ago the civil authorities of the district, who were very energetic persons, penetrated with the spirit of the age, thought it a pity that the site should be wasted; and as at the time there was some idea of developing the resources of the place by running a new line of railway through it—an idea which never came to anything—they projected a street where this house now stands; but the public feeling—this benighted superstition of which I spoke just now to Your Serene Highness—was so strongly against the plan, that it had to be given up, and only this one solitary dwelling came into existence.’

“‘What form does the superstition take?’ asked the Prince, not feeling quite that contempt for the villagers’ weakness which was expected of him. The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“‘I am afraid that Your Serene Highness’ opinion of our poor people’s intelligence will not be raised when I tell you that they have a belief—which I have in vain tried to combat—that the churchyard claims a yearly tribute of a life from any family which dares to inhabit this sacrilegious dwelling.’ He laughed contemptuously while he spoke; but the Prince, as he told me, was quite unable to echo his mirth.

“‘It has always stood empty then?’ he asked, with rather a sinking heart.

“‘Oh dear no, sir; if I have conveyed that idea to Your Serene Highness, I have expressed myself very clumsily; it has indeed been vacant for some little time, but during the first years after it was built—indeed, until just before my own arrival, and I am but a newcomer—it was continuously, or almost continuously, inhabited.’

“‘And was there—did there ever happen any—any accident—any—any event to justify or confirm the villagers’ prejudice against it?’

“The doctor hesitated. ‘Not to justify it certainly, sir,’ he answered, rather warmly; ‘but to give it a slight colour possibly. As ill luck would have it, the first tenant was found dead in his bed only ten days or so after his taking possession; there got about some rumour of foul play, because there were black marks on the man’s throat; but they were quite without foundation: he was an apoplectic subject, his death attributable to purely natural causes, and the whole unlucky accident a pure coincidence.’

“‘Not a very pleasant coincidence!’ the Prince replied; ‘but still, no doubt as you say, it was only that, which of course was proved by no repetition of it happening?’

“The doctor was silent.

“‘Did not people’s alarm begin to subside when they found that no death occurred in the second year?’ inquired the Prince, wilily.

“The visitor fell into the trap.

“‘Well, sir, unfortunately there did happen another death in the second year; but it was one which might just as well have occurred in any other house in the place: such culpable carelessness must have had the same result wherever it existed. In the second year, a stupid servant girl upset a lighted paraffin lamp over her own clothes, and was so badly burnt that she died of her injuries.’

“The Prince smiled rather grimly. ‘Number two!’ he said, checking the catastrophes off on his fingers. ‘But that was all? were there no more coincidences?’ (with a slight ironical accent): ‘the third year’s character was quite clear?’

“Again a hesitation was apparent before the person addressed responded. ‘In the third year, I must own to Your Serene Highness, that there was an accident, but it was as clearly due to gross carelessness as the death of the servant girl: a woman standing at an open window on the third floor with a baby in her arms let it fall on to the roadway beneath, and of course the poor infant was picked up stone dead; but, as Your Serene Highness will allow, there could be no possible connection between—’

“‘And since then it has stood empty?’ broke in the Prince, with less than his usual courtesy. ‘You do not answer; but I see by your manner that such has been the case.’

“‘At least, sir, there have been no more deaths in it; I can vouch for that,’ returned the other, jesuitically.

“‘Well, Herr Doktor, I must not detain you any longer from your patients,’ the Prince said, and so the visitor bowed himself out with some alacrity, leaving his patient feeling very uncomfortable. You must remember that it was his nerves that chiefly ailed, and what he had heard had not tended to improve their condition. He told Von Hammerstein the story, and tried to jest with him as to the obviously impending fate of one or other of them, proposing a dismal bet as to which it would be; but Von Hammerstein was a little superstitious too, and his answering mirth did not ring very genuine. To do him justice, the Prince, rather ashamed of the impression made upon him, tried his best to shake it off, and was fairly successful all day, but when night came it returned on him, do what he would, with redoubled force. The yearly tribute exacted by the churchyard, by those vengeful three-hundred-year-old dead who were lying beneath him, haunted his imagination with an unaccountable power of producing terror. It was doubtless he whom they would claim. He, no other than he! Had he not under their baleful influence already become aware of a diminution of vital force, of a sickly languor? His evil star had sent him to this charnel-house, where it was only a matter of time how soon he should join his fellow-victims—the throttled man, burnt woman, and mangled child! After hours of these agreeable musings, the bromide at last took effect; and he fell into a sound sleep, from which he awoke so much refreshed that he felt quite cheerful, and rather ashamed of the completeness with which his supernatural fears had got the better of him over night. After having drunk his morning coffee, he felt so well, that he dressed and got on his horse—not poor Porthos, who was still hors de combat—he said the idea struck him that perhaps the tribute need not be a human one, and that Porthos might be the doomed victim.

“The Prince served all day with his troop; the work was light, as the district was evidently beginning to realise the futility of its struggle against the armed hand of law and order; and was riding home in very good spirits at the thought that his further stay at his charnel-house, as he now always called it, would be brief, when, at the entrance of the little Platz, he saw a very handsome young man in a naval uniform—there were, of course, no sailors among the troops stationed at the village—saluting, and looking, meanwhile, with a pleasant smile of recognition, at his own equerry.

“‘Who is your friend?’ he asked.

“‘He is my brother, sir,’ Von Hammerstein answered. ‘He has just returned from the South African station, and not knowing that we had left Munich, went thither, thinking to find me, and, hearing that we had been ordered here, followed us. We have not met since before the war,’ he added, in explanation of this fraternal eagerness.

“‘He is a very good-looking fellow,’ the Prince said.

“‘He is not a bad boy,’ Von Hammerstein answered; then beginning to laugh, ‘I think he has already repented of the impulse that brought him here, for the place is so crammed that he cannot find a hole or a corner to sleep in: he must bivouac under a haystack; a sailor is accustomed to hardships.’

“‘So!’ replied the Prince, with that long-drawn German monosyllable, which is as comprehensive as our ‘Oh!’ Then a good-natured thought struck him. ‘Why should not he come to us? That room on the ground floor, the one with the glass door into the garden, is vacant: why should he not occupy it? Nothing would be easier than to rig up a bed or a sofa there for him.’

“‘It is extremely kind of your Serene Highness,’ Von Hammerstein answered, looking pleased.

“‘Call him, and tell him so.’

“The equerry gladly complied, and the young sailor approached, and, being offered the proposed hospitality by the Prince, thanked him with much propriety and modesty, and with blushes that so heightened his good looks that His Serene Highness expressed himself to the youth’s brother as quite prepossessed in his favour. He invited him to join the regiment at mess that night, and, after it, returned to the ‘Charnel-house,’ feeling almost cured of his temporary illness, in high good-humour at the thought of a speedy return to the pleasures of Munich, and laughing with the two Von Hammersteins at his own superstitious fears of the previous night. ‘I bid defiance to the churchyard and all its inhabitants!’ he cried gaily, as he bade a kindly good night to his young guest.

“‘Kam je ein Todter aus der Gruft gestiegen?’

“He jumped into bed; and, feeling that bromide or any other calming potions were superfluous, fell instantly and soundly asleep. He says he does not think that even the Last Trump would have awoke him, so ample were the arrears of slumber that he had to make up. Nor does he believe that he ever stirred—lying like a log through the whole night in the position in which he had first placed himself. It was broad daylight when he at length sprang into consciousness. I say sprang, for even when he did awake, it was not spontaneously, but he was violently dragged back to life and motion by the noise of the door of his room being burst open.”

“I thought he said that the Last Trump would not have awoke him?”

“Possibly it would not; but, anyhow, the door did, and, when he had collected his sleep-scattered wits, he thought that he must still be in the land of visions, so strangely unexpected and unaccountable was the sight that met his eyes.”

“What was it?”

“His Colonel, usually a stolid, buckrammed German officer, was kneeling by his bedside, kissing his hand, and crying, ‘Oh, thank God! Thank God!’

“The spectacle was such an astonishing one that it roused the sleeper effectually.

“‘My dear Colonel! Is it possible? What has happened?’

“But the Colonel could only reiterate, ‘Thank God! Thank God you are safe!’

“‘Why should I not be safe?’ inquired the Prince, hopelessly puzzled. ‘I have been enjoying the best sleep I ever had in my life, from which, but for your most unexpected help, I do not know when I should have roused myself; there is nothing very dangerous in that!’

“‘Thank God! thank God!’ his superior officer repeated once again, in a key of the most intense relief; then collecting himself, ‘You know, sir, that I am not superstitious—no believer in dreams and omens. Well, last night I had the most astonishingly vivid dream that I saw you—I felt that it must be you, though I could not see your face—that I saw a dead man, covered with a bloody sheet, being carried out of the door of this house.’ (The Prince was wide awake enough by this time, and had sprung up into a sitting position.) ‘It was repeated three times, the last time with such an extraordinary reality of presentment that I woke up all in a cold sweat, and, unable to bear the impression made upon me, threw on my clothes and rushed here at once to convince myself that I had been fooled by a devilish vision. Imagine my horror when on nearing your door I saw just such a procession as I had dreamed of—the prostrate figure covered with a bloody sheet—being carried out by two or three of your servants!’

“‘Dear God!’ cried out the Prince, horrified: ‘who was it?’

“‘I could not ask them,’ answered the Colonel, again almost mastered by his emotion, to the intensity of which his livid complexion sufficiently testified; ‘but I tore the sheet off the face and saw, thank God, not your Highness’ features, but—’

“‘But whose? But whose?’

“‘But those of Von Hammerstein’s poor young brother, Albrecht, to whom you so kindly offered your hospitality last night.’

“‘Dead?’ shouted the Prince, in the extremity of his horror and amazement. ‘How? where?’

“‘It seems,’ returned the other, now beginning to grow able to tell his tale more connectedly, ‘that the unhappy lad had been subject from childhood to epileptic fits. He must have felt one coming on soon after he went to bed last night, have risen and tried to find the door; but in the dark and his ignorance of the room must have made for the glass door into the garden instead. The fit must have seized him just as he reached it, for he had fallen right through it, severing an artery in his throat, by which—since no one was near to come to his help—he bled to death, and was found perfectly cold this morning.’

“‘Good God!’ gasped the Prince; nor for the moment could he bring out anything but this ejaculation.

“‘Your people, as I arrived, were in the act of carrying him to the mortuary, as they were anxious to have all trace of the catastrophe removed before Your Highness awoke; but I hope you will pardon me, sir; I could not rest until I had assured myself, by the sight of my own eyes, that you were safe; and so intruded upon you in a manner which, you will believe, I never should have permitted myself under any less urgent circumstances.’

“‘So you see,’ the Prince said in conclusion, ‘the churchyard claimed its victim after all.’”

•    •    •    •

There was a short silence; then, “I call it a detestable story!” said one.

“But it is true.”

“Truth is often detestable.”

Under the Cloak

(1873)

If there is a thing in the world that my soul hateth, it is a long night journey by rail. In the old coaching days I do not think that I should have minded it, passing swiftly through a summer night on the top of a speedy coach with the star arch black-blue above one’s head, the sweet smell of earth and her numberless flowers and grasses in one’s nostrils, and the pleasant trot, trot, trot, trot, of the four strong horses in one’s ears. But by railway! in a little stuffy compartment, with nothing to amuse you if you keep awake; with a dim lamp hanging above you, tantalizing you with the idea that you can read by its light, and when you try, satisfactorily proving to you that you cannot; and, if you sleep, breaking your neck, or at least stiffening it, by the brutal arrangement of the hard cushions.

These thoughts pass sulkily and rebelliously through my head as I sit in my salon, in the Ecu at Geneva, on the afternoon of the fine autumn day on which, in an evil hour, I have settled to take my place in the night train for Paris. I have put off going as long as I can. I like Geneva, and am leaving some pleasant and congenial friends, but now go I must. My husband is to meet me at the station in Paris at six o’clock to-morrow morning. Six o’clock! what a barbarous hour at which to arrive! I am putting on my bonnet and cloak; I look at myself in the glass with an air of anticipative disgust. Yes, I look trim and spruce enough now—a not disagreeable object perhaps—with sleek hair, quick and alert eyes, and pink-tinted cheeks. Alas! at six o’clock tomorrow morning, what a different tale there will be to tell! dishevelled, dusty locks, half-open weary eyes, a disordered dress, and a green-coloured countenance.

I turn away with a pettish gesture, and reflecting that at least there is no wisdom in living my miseries twice over, I go down-stairs, and get into the hired open carriage which awaits me. My maid and man follow with the luggage. I give stricter injunctions than ordinary to my maid never for one moment to lose her hold of the dressing-case, which contains, as it happens, a great many more valuable jewels than people are wont to travel in foreign parts with, nor of a certain costly and beautiful Dresden china and gold Louis Quatorze clock, which I am carrying home as a present to my people. We reach the station, and I straightway betake myself to the first-class Salle d’Attente, there to remain penned up till the officials undo the gates of purgatory and release us; an arrangement whose wisdom I have yet to learn. There are ten minutes to spare, and the salle is filling fuller and fuller every moment. Chiefly my countrymen, countrywomen, and country children, beginning to troop home to their partridges. I look curiously round at them, speculating as to which of them will be my companion or companions through the night.

There are not very unusual types: girls in sailor hats and blond hair-fringes; strong-minded old maids in painstakingly ugly waterproofs; baldish fathers; fattish mothers; a German or two, with prominent pale eyes and spectacles. I have just decided on the companions I should prefer: a large young man, who belongs to nobody, and looks as if he spent most of his life in laughing—(alas! he is not likely! he is sure to want to smoke!)—and a handsome and prosperous-looking young couple. They are more likely, as very probably, in the man’s case, the bride-love will overcome the cigar-love. The porter comes up. The key turns in the lock: the doors open. At first I am standing close to them, flattening my nose against the glass, and looking out on the pavement; but as the passengers become more numerous, I withdraw from my prominent position, anticipating a rush for carriages. I hate and dread exceedingly a crowd, and would much prefer at any time to miss my train rather than be squeezed and jostled by one. In consequence, my maid and I are almost the last people to emerge, and have the last and worst choice of seats. We run along the train looking in; the footman, my maid, and I—full—full everywhere!

“Dames Seules?” asks the guard.

“Certainly not! neither ‘Dames Seules,’ nor ‘Fumeurs,’ but if it must be one or the other, certainly ‘Fumeurs.’”

I am growing nervous, when I see the footman, who is a little ahead of us, standing with an open carriage-door in his hand, and signing to us to make haste. Ah! it is all right! it always comes right when one does not fuss oneself.

“Plenty of room here, ’m; only two gentlemen!”

I put my foot on the high step and climb in. Rather uncivil of the two gentlemen! neither of them offers to help me, but they are not looking this way, I suppose. “Mind the dressing-case!” I cry nervously, as I stretch out my hand to help the maid Watson up. The man pushes her from behind; in she comes—dressing-case, clock and all; here we are for the night!

I am so busy and amused looking out of the window, seeing the different parties bidding their friends good-by, and watching with indignation the barbaric and malicious manner in which the porters hurl the luckless luggage about, that we have steamed out of the station, and are fairly off for Paris, before I have the curiosity to glance at my fellow-passengers. Well! when I do take a look at them, I do not make much of it. Watson and I occupy the two seats by one window, facing one another. Our fellow travellers have not taken the other two window-seats; they occupy the middle ones, next us. They are both reading behind newspapers. Well! we shall not get much amusement out of them. I give them up as a bad job. Ah! if I could have had my wish, and had the laughing young man, and the pretty young couple, for company, the night would not perhaps have seemed so long. However, I should have been mortified for them to have seen how green I looked when the dawn came; and, as to these commis voyageurs, I do not care if I look as green as grass in their eyes. Thus, all no doubt is for the best; and at all events it is a good trite copy-book maxim to say so. So I forget all about them: fix my eyes on the landscape racing by, and fall into a variety of thoughts. “Will my husband really get up in time to come and meet me at the station to-morrow morning? He does so cordially hate getting up. My only chance is his not having gone to bed at all! How will he be looking? I have not seen him for four months. Will he have succeeded in curbing his tendency to fat, during his Norway fishing? Probably not. Fishing, on the contrary is rather a fat-making occupation; sluggish and sedentary. Shall we have a pleasant party at the house we are going to for shooting? To whom in Paris shall I go for my gown? Worth? No, Worth is beyond me.” Then I leave the future and go back into past enjoyments; excursions to Lausanne, trips down the to lake to Chillon; a hundred and one pleasantnesses. The time slips by: the afternoon is drawing towards evening; a beginning of dusk is coming over the landscape.

I look round. Good Heavens! what can those men find so interesting in the papers? I thought them hideously dull, when I looked over them this morning; and yet they are still persistently reading. What can they have got hold of? I cannot well see what the man beside me has; vis-à-vis is buried in an English Times. Just as I am thinking about him, he puts down his paper, and I see his face. Nothing very remarkable! a long black beard, and hat tilted somewhat low over his forehead. I turn away my eyes hastily, for fear of being caught inquisitively scanning him; but still, out of their corners I see that he has taken a little bottle out of his travelling bag, has poured some of its contents into a glass, and is putting it to his lips. It appears as if—and, at the time it happens, I have no manner of doubt that he is drinking. Then I feel that he is addressing me. I look up and towards him: he is holding out the phial to me, and saying:

“May I take the liberty of offering Madame some?”

“No, thank you, monsieur!” I answer, shaking my head hastily and speaking rather abruptly. There is nothing that I dislike more than being offered strange eatables or drinkables in a train, or a strange hymn-book in church.

He smiles politely, and then adds:

“Perhaps the other lady might be persuaded to take a little.”

“No, thank you, sir, I’m much obliged to you,” replies Watson briskly, in almost as ungrateful a tone as mine.

Again he smiles, bows, and re-buries himself in his newspaper. The thread of my thoughts is broken; I feel an odd curiosity as to the nature of the contents of that bottle. Certainly it is not sherry or spirit of any kind, for it has diffused no odour through the carriage. All this time the man beside me has said and done nothing. I wish he would move or speak, or do something. I peep covertly at him. Well! at all events, he is well defended against the night chill. What a voluminous cloak he is wrapped in; how entirely it shrouds his figure; trimmed with fur too! why, it might be January instead of September. I do not know why, but that cloak makes me feel rather uncomfortable. I wish they would both move to the window, instead of sitting next to us. Bah! am I setting up to be a timid dove? I, who rather pique myself on my bravery—on my indifference to tramps, bulls, ghosts? The clock has been deposited with the umbrellas, parasols, spare shawls, rugs, etc., in the netting above Watson’s head. The dressing-case—a very large and heavy one—is sitting on her lap. I lean forwards and say to her:

“That box must rest very heavily on your knee, and I want a footstool—I should be more comfortable if I had one—let me put my feet on it.”

I have an idea that, somehow, that my sapphires will be safer if I have them where I can always feel that they are there. We make the desired change in our arrangements. Yes! both my feet are on it.

The landscape outside is darkening quickly now; our dim lamp is beginning to assert its importance. Still the men read. I feel a sensation of irritation. What can they mean by it? it is utterly impossible that they can decipher the small print of the Times by this feeble, shaky glimmer.

As I am so thinking, the one who had before spoken lays down his paper, folds it up and deposits it on the seat beside him. Then, drawing his little bottle out of his bag a second time, drinks, or seems to drink, from it. Then he again turns to me.

“Madame will pardon me, but if Madame could be induced to try a little of this; it is a cordial of a most refreshing and invigorating description; and if she will have the amiability to allow me to say so, madame looks faint.”

(What can he mean by his urgency? Is it pure politeness? I wish it were not growing so dark.) These thoughts run through my head as I hesitate for an instant what answer to make. Then an idea occurs to me, and I manufacture a civil smile and say, “Thank you very much, monsieur! I am a little faint, as you observe. I think I will avail myself of your obliging offer.” So saying, I take the glass, and touch it with my lips. I give you my word of honour that I do not think I did more; I did not mean to swallow a drop, but I suppose I must have done. He smiles with a gratified air.

“The other lady will now, perhaps, follow your example?”

By this time I am beginning to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. Why, I should be puzzled to explain. What is this cordial that he is so eager to urge upon us? Though determined not to subject myself to its influence, I must see its effect upon another person. Rather brutal of me, perhaps; rather in the spirit of the anatomist, who, in the interest of science, tortures live dogs and cats; but I am telling you facts—not what I ought to have done, but what I did. I make a sign to Watson to drink some. She obeys, nothing loath. She has been working hard all day; packing and getting under weigh, and she is tired. There is no feigning about her! She has emptied the glass. Now to see what comes of it—what happens to my live dog! The bottle is replaced in the bag; still we are racing, racing on, past the hills and fields and villages. How indistinct they are all growing! I turn back from the contemplation of the outside view to the inside one. Why, the woman is asleep already! her chin buried in her chest; her mouth half open; looking exceedingly imbecile and very plain, as most people, when asleep out of bed, do look. A nice invigorating potion, indeed! I wish to Heaven that I had gone in Fumeurs, or even with that cavalcade of nursery-maids and unwholesome-looking babies in Dames Seules, next door. At all events, I am not at all sleepy myself: that is a blessing. I shall see what happens. Yes, by-the-by, I must see what he meant to happen: I must affect to fall asleep too. I close my eyes, and, gradually sinking my chin on my chest, try to droop my jaws and hang my cheeks, with a semblance of bona-fide slumber. Apparently I succeed pretty well. After the lapse of some minutes, I distinctly feel two hands very cautiously and carefully lifting and removing my feet from the dressing-box.

A cold chill creeps over me, and then the blood rushes to my head and ears. What am I to do? what am I to do? I have always thought the better of myself ever since for it; but, strange to say, I keep my presence of mind. Still affecting to sleep, I give a sort of kick, and instantly the hands are withdrawn, and all is perfectly quiet again. I now feign to wake gradually, with a yawn and a stretch; and, on moving about my feet a little, find that, despite my kick, they have been too clever for me, and have dexterously removed my box and substituted another. The way in which I make this pleasant discovery is that whereas mine was perfectly flat at the top, on the surface of the object that is now beneath my feet there is some sort of excrescence—a handle of some sort or other. There is no denying it—brave I may be–I may laugh at people for running from bulls; for disliking to sleep in a room by themselves, for fear of ghosts; for hurrying past tramps: but now I am most thoroughly frightened. I look cautiously, in a sideways manner, at the man beside me. How very still he is! Were they his hands, or the hands of the man opposite him? I take a fuller look than I have yet ventured to do; turning slightly round for the purpose. He is still reading, or at least still holding the paper, for the reading must be a farce. I look at his hands: they are in precisely the same position as they were when I affected to go to sleep, although the pose of the rest of his body is slightly altered. Suddenly, I turn extremely cold, for it has dawned on me that they are not real hands—they are certainly false ones. Yes, though the carriage is shaking very much with our rapid motion, and the light is shaking, too, yet there is no mistake. I look indeed more closely, so as to be quite sure. The one nearest me is ungloved; the other gloved. I look at the nearest one. Yes, it is of an opaque waxen whiteness. I can plainly see the rouge put under the finger-nails to represent the colouring of life. I try to give one glance at his face. The paper still partially hides it; and, as he is leaning his head back against the cushion, where the light hardly penetrates, I am completely baffled in my efforts.

Great Heavens! what is going to happen to me? what shall I do? how much of him is real? where are his real hands? what is going on under that awful cloak? The fur border touches me as I sit by him. I draw convulsively and shrinkingly away, and try to squeeze myself up as close as possible to the window. But alas! to what good? how absolutely and utterly powerless I am! how entirely at their mercy! And there is Watson still sleeping swinishly! breathing heavily opposite me. Shall I try to wake her? But to what end? She, being under the influence of that vile drug, my efforts will certainly be useless, and will probably arouse the man to employ violence against me. Sooner or later, in the course of the night, I suppose they are pretty sure to murder me, but I had rather that it should be later than sooner.

While I think these things, I am lying back quite still, for, as I philosophically reflect, not all the screaming in the world will help me: if I had twenty-lung power I could not drown the rush of an express-train. Oh, if my dear boy were but here—my husband I mean,—fat or lean, how thankful I should be to see him! Oh, that cloak, and those horrid waxy hands! Of course I see it now! They remained stuck out, while the man’s real ones were fumbling about my feet. In the midst of my agony of fright, a thought of Madame Tussaud flashes ludicrously across me. Then they begin to talk of me. It is plain that they are not taken in by my feint of sleep: they speak in a clear, loud voice, evidently for my benefit. One of them begins by saying, “What a good-looking woman she is—evidently in her première jeunesse too”—(Reader, I struck thirty last May)—“and also there can be no doubt as to her being of exalted rank—a duchess probably.” (“A dead duchess by morning,” think I grimly). They go on to say how odd it is that people in my class of life never travel with their own jewels, but always with paste ones, the real ones being meanwhile deposited at the bankers. My poor, poor sapphires! good-by—a long good-by to you. But, indeed, I will willingly compound for the loss of you and the rest of my ornaments—will go bare-necked, and bare-armed, or clad in Salviati beads for the rest of my life, so that I do but attain the next stopping place alive.

As I am so thinking, one of the men looks, or I imagine that he looks, rather curiously towards me. In a paroxysm of fear lest they should read on my face the signs of the agony of terror I am enduring, I throw my pocket-handkerchief—a very fine cambric one—over my face.

And now, O reader, I am going to tell you something which I am sure you will not believe; I can hardly believe it myself, but, as I so lie, despite the tumult of my mind–despite the chilly terror which seems to be numbing my feelings—in the midst of it all a drowsiness keeps stealing over me. I am now convinced either that vile potion must have been of extraordinary strength, or that I, through the shaking of the carriage, or the unsteadiness of my hand, carried more to my mouth, and swallowed more—I did not mean to swallow any—than I intended, for—you will hardly credit it, but—I fell asleep!

•    •    •    •

When I awake—awake with a bewildered mixed sense of having been a long time asleep—of not knowing where I am—and of having some great dread and horror on my mind—awake and look round, the dawn is breaking. I shiver, with the chilly sensation that the coming of even a warm day brings, and look round, still half-unconsciously, in a misty way. But what has happened? how empty the carriage is! the dressing-case is gone! the clock is gone! the man who sat nearly opposite me is gone. Watson is gone! but the man in the cloak and the wax hands still sits beside me! Still the hands are holding the paper; still the fur is touching me! Good God! I am tête-à-tête with him! A feeling of the most appalling desolation and despair comes over me—vanquishes me utterly. I clasp my hands together frantically, and, still looking at the dim form beside me, groan out—“Well! I did not think that Watson would have forsaken me!” Instantly, a sort of movement and shiver runs through the figure: the newspaper drops from the hands, which, however continue to be still held out in the same position as if still grasping it; and behind the newspaper, I see by the dim morning light and the dim lamp-gleams that there is no real face, but a mask. A sort of choked sound is coming from behind the mask. Shivers of cold fear are running over me. Never to this day shall I know what gave me the despairing courage to do it, but, before I know what I am doing, I find myself tearing at the cloak—tearing away the mask—tearing away the hands. It would be better to find anything underneath—Satan himself—a horrible dead body—any thing—sooner than submit any longer to this hideous mystery. And I am rewarded. When the cloak lies at the bottom of the carriage—when the mask, and the false hands and false feet—(there are false feet too)—are also cast away in different directions, what do you think I find underneath?

Watson! Yes: it appears that while I slept—I feel sure that they must have rubbed some more of the drug on my lips while I was unconscious, or I never could have slept so heavily or so long—they dressed up Watson in the mask, feet, hands, and cloak, set the hat on her head, gagged her, and placed her beside me in the attitude occupied by the man. They had then, at the next station, got out, taking with them dressing-case and clock, and had made off in all security. When I arrive in Paris, you will not be surprised to hear that it does not once occur to me whether I am looking green or no.

And this is the true history of my night journey to Paris! You will be glad, I dare say, to learn that I ultimately recovered my sapphires, and a good many of my other ornaments. The police being promptly set on, the robbers were, after much trouble and time, at length secured; and it turned out that the man in the cloak was an ex-valet of my husband’s who was acquainted with my bad habit of travelling in company with my trinkets—a bad habit which I have since seen fit to abandon.

About this eBook

TALES TOLD AT TWILIGHT

STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL

RHODA BROUGHTON
(1840–1920)

This small collection presents the supernatural fiction of popular Victorian author Rhoda Broughton. Whether describing ghostly manifestations, prescient visions of death, or other mysterious occurrences, her stories often manage to give a new twist to folkloric elements, sometimes laced with threads of sly humor.

* * * *

Rhoda Broughton (29 November 1840 – 5 June 1920) was a Welsh novelist and short story writer, with about two dozen books published.

Her early novels earned a reputation for sensationalism, with fast heroines of easy morals, which caused her later and stronger work to be neglected by serious critics; but her work is notable for being slightly risqué, rather than sensational. Always an important feature in all her novels is criticism of woman’s role and position in society. Very often Broughton’s women are strong characters, and with them she manages to subvert traditional images of femininity, while never failing to tell a gripping tale.

Respected Victorianist scholar Richard C. Tobias calls her “the leading woman novelist in England between the death of George Eliot and the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s career.”

This compilation was created by ECM for MobileRead.com, November 2018, and may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The contents of this collection are taken from Tales for Christmas Eve (1873), Betty’s Visions & Mrs. Smith of Longmains (1886), and Pall Mall Magazine, May 1894.

Text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

Click here for editing notes.

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EDITING NOTES

>>TOC     >>ABOUT

This is my own compilation. Text was obtained from the Internet Archive and HathiTrust:

http://www.archive.org/details/talesforchristma00brourich
http://www.archive.org/details/bettysvisionsmrs00brou
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064476896

OCR and printer’s errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted.

Story titles are cross-linked to table of contents.

Embedded font “Fontin” by Jos Buivenga used for titling.

Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.