Date: 1854-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Suspense; Mystery
Description: When Francis is roused from his sleep on the eve of his birthday and confronted by the sight of a woman trying to stab him, he is unsure whether she is real or an apparition. Years later, against the wishes of his mother, he marries Alicia, a woman with a strange resemblance to the mysterious visitor, who ends up attacking him on his birthday, before vanishing from his life. Is Francis’s wife a ghost, a demon, or a living human being? And will the prophecy of the night-time visitation be fulfilled one day?
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain worldwide.

Dream Woman

WILKIE COLLINS
(1824–1889)

ADDITIONAL STORIES IN
HOLLY-TREE INN BY:
CHARLES DICKENS
(1812–1870)
WILLIAM HOWITT
(1792–1879)
ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER
(1825–1864)
HOLME LEE [Harret Parr]
(1828–1900)

MobileRead Edition
2021

CONTENTS:

- The Dream Woman

- Brother Morgan’s Story
of the Dream-Woman

- The Holly-Tree Inn

When Francis is roused from his sleep on the eve of his birthday and confronted by the sight of a woman trying to stab him, he is unsure whether she is real or an apparition. Years later, against the wishes of his mother, he marries Alicia, a woman with a strange resemblance to the mysterious visitor, who ends up attacking him on his birthday, before vanishing from his life. Is Francis’s wife a ghost, a demon, or a living human being? And will the prophecy of the night-time visitation be fulfilled one day?

*   *   *

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

Collins remains most famous for his novels The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868), in which he pioneered a new style of “sensation” writing, the influence of which can still be seen in today’s culture in the genres of crime, mystery and suspense. The Moonstone is considered to be the first modern English detective novel.

He is also noted for his close relationship with Charles Dickens, who regarded him as the most talented of his many protégés.

*   *   *

The original version of this story was published in Household Words magazine (“The Holly-Tree Inn,” chapter “The Ostler”, Christmas number 1855).
Revised for the collection The Queen of Hearts (1859) as “Brother Morgan’s story of the Dream-Woman.”
Expanded and revised for American reading tour 1873; this expanded version appeared in The Frozen Deep and Other Stories (1874) as “The Dream Woman: a Mystery in Four Narratives”; and in Alicia Warlock (a Mystery) and Other Stories (1875).

This ebook is in the public domain worldwide, because the authors died more than 100 years ago, and contents were published prior to 1925.

THE DREAM WOMAN

A MYSTERY
IN FOUR NARRATIVES

CONTENTS:

- First Narrative

Introductory Statement
of the Facts.
By Percy Fairbank

- Second Narrative

The Ostler’s Story.
Told by Himself

- Third Narrative

The Story Continued.
By Percy Fairbank

- Fourth (and Last) Narrative

The Statement
of Joseph Rigobert.

- Last Lines

Added By Percy Fairbank

Introductory Note

Introductory Note. – The original version of this story was published, many years since, in Household Words and was afterwards printed in the collection of my shorter stories called “The Queen of Hearts”. In the present version – written for my public readings in the United States – new characters and new incidents are introduced; and a new beginning and ending have been written. Indeed, the whole complexion of the narrative differs so essentially from the older and shorter version, as to justify me in believing that the reader will find in these pages what is, to all practical intents and purposes, a new story.
– W. C.

PERSONS OF THE MYSTERY

Francis Raven | …… | (Ostler)
Mrs. Raven | …… | (His mother)
Mrs. Chance | …… | (His aunt)
Percy Fairbank | …… | (His master
Mrs. Fairbank | …… | and mistress)
Joseph Rigobert | …… | (His fellow-servant)
Alicia Warlock | …… | (His wife)

Period – The Present Time.

Scene – Partly in England, partly in France.

THE FIRST NARRATIVE

INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT
OF THE FACTS.
BY PERCY FAIRBANK.

•  I  •

“Hullo, there! Hostler! Hullo-o-o!”

“My dear! why don’t you look for the bell?”

“I have looked – there is no bell.”

“And nobody in the yard. How very extraordinary! Call again, dear.”

“Hostler! Hullo, there! Hostler-r-r!”

My second call echoes through empty space, and rouses nobody – produces, in short, no visible result. I am at the end of my resources – I don’t know what to say or what to do next. Here I stand in the solitary inn yard of a strange town, with two horses to hold, and a lady to take care of. By way of adding to my responsibilities, it so happens that one of the horses is dead lame, and that the lady is my wife.

Who am I? – you will ask.

There is plenty of time to answer the question. Nothing happens; and nobody appears to receive us. Let me introduce myself and my wife.

I am Percy Fairbank – English gentleman – age (let us say) forty – no profession – moderate politics – middle height – fair complexion – easy character – plenty of money.

My wife is a French lady. She was Mademoiselle Clotilde Delorge – when I was first presented to her at her father’s house in France. I fell in love with her – I really don’t know why. It might have been because I was perfectly idle, and had nothing else to do at the time. Or it might have been because all my friends said she was the very last woman whom I ought to think of marrying. On the surface, I must own, there is nothing in common between Mrs. Fairbank and me. She is tall; she is dark; she is nervous, excitable, romantic; in all her opinions she proceeds to extremes. What could such a woman see in me? what could I see in her? I know no more than you do. In some mysterious manner we exactly suit each other. We have been man and wife for ten years, and our only regret is, that we have no children. I don’t know what you may think; I call that – upon the whole – a happy marriage.

So much for ourselves. The next question is – what has brought us into the inn yard? and why am I obliged to turn groom, and hold the horses?

We live for the most part in France – at the country house in which my wife and I first met. Occasionally, by way of variety, we pay visits to my friends in England. We are paying one of those visits now. Our host is an old college friend of mine, possessed of a fine estate in Somersetshire; and we have arrived at his house – called Farleigh Hall – toward the close of the hunting season.

On the day of which I am now writing – destined to be a memorable day in our calendar – the hounds meet at Farleigh Hall. Mrs. Fairbank and I are mounted on two of the best horses in my friend’s stables. We are quite unworthy of that distinction; for we know nothing and care nothing about hunting. On the other hand, we delight in riding, and we enjoy the breezy spring morning and the fair and fertile English landscape surrounding us on every side. While the hunt prospers, we follow the hunt. But when a check occurs – when time passes and patience is sorely tried; when the bewildered dogs run hither and thither, and strong language falls from the lips of exasperated sportsmen – we fail to take any further interest in the proceedings. We turn our horses’ heads in the direction of a grassy lane, delightfully shaded by trees. We trot merrily along the lane, and find ourselves on an open common. We gallop across the common, and follow the windings of a second lane. We cross a brook, we pass through a village, we emerge into pastoral solitude among the hills. The horses toss their heads, and neigh to each other, and enjoy it as much as we do. The hunt is forgotten. We are as happy as a couple of children; we are actually singing a French song – when in one moment our merriment comes to an end. My wife’s horse sets one of his forefeet on a loose stone, and stumbles. His rider’s ready hand saves him from falling. But, at the first attempt he makes to go on, the sad truth shows itself – a tendon is strained; the horse is lame.

What is to be done? We are strangers in a lonely part of the country. Look where we may, we see no signs of a human habitation. There is nothing for it but to take the bridle road up the hill, and try what we can discover on the other side. I transfer the saddles, and mount my wife on my own horse. He is not used to carry a lady; he misses the familiar pressure of a man’s legs on either side of him; he fidgets, and starts, and kicks up the dust. I follow on foot, at a respectful distance from his heels, leading the lame horse. Is there a more miserable object on the face of creation than a lame horse? I have seen lame men and lame dogs who were cheerful creatures; but I never yet saw a lame horse who didn’t look heartbroken over his own misfortune.

For half-an-hour my wife capers and curvets sideways along the bridle-road. I trudge on behind her; and the heartbroken horse halts behind me. Hard by the top of the hill, our melancholy procession passes a Somersetshire peasant at work in a field. I summon the man to approach us; and the man looks at me stolidly, from the middle of the field, without stirring a step. I ask at the top of my voice how far it is to Farleigh Hall. The Somersetshire peasant answers at the top of his voice:

“Vourteen mile. Gi’ oi a drap o’ zyder.”

I translate (for my wife’s benefit) from the Somersetshire language into the English language. We are fourteen miles from Farleigh Hall; and our friend in the field desires to be rewarded, for giving us that information, with a drop of cider. There is the peasant, painted by himself! Quite a bit of character, my dear! Quite a bit of character!

Mrs. Fairbank doesn’t view the study of agricultural human nature with my relish. Her fidgety horse will not allow her a moment’s repose; she is beginning to lose her temper.

“We can’t go fourteen miles in this way,” she says. “Where is the nearest inn? Ask that brute in the field!”

I take a shilling from my pocket and hold it up in the sun. The shilling exercises magnetic virtues. The shilling draws the peasant slowly toward me from the middle of the field. I inform him that we want to put up the horses and to hire a carriage to take us back to Farleigh Hall. Where can we do that? The peasant answers (with his eye on the shilling):

“At Oonderbridge, to be zure.” (At Underbridge, to be sure.)

“Is it far to Underbridge?”

The peasant repeats, “Var to Oonderbridge?” – and laughs at the question. “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” (Underbridge is evidently close by – if we could only find it.) “Will you show us the way, my man?” “Will you gi’ oi a drap of zyder?” I courteously bend my head, and point to the shilling. The agricultural intelligence exerts itself. The peasant joins our melancholy procession. My wife is a fine woman, but he never once looks at my wife – and, more extraordinary still, he never even looks at the horses. His eyes are with his mind – and his mind is on the shilling.

We reach the top of the hill – and, behold on the other side, nestling in a valley, the shrine of our pilgrimage, the town of Underbridge! Here our guide claims his shilling, and leaves us to find out the inn for ourselves. I am constitutionally a polite man. I say “Good morning” at parting. The guide looks at me with the shilling between his teeth to make sure that it is a good one. “Marnin!” he says savagely – and turns his back on us, as if we had offended him. A curious product, this, of the growth of civilization. If I didn’t see a church spire at Underbridge, I might suppose that we had lost ourselves on a savage island.

•   •   •   •   •

•  II  •

Arriving at the town, we had no difficulty in finding the inn. The town is composed of one desolate street; and midway in that street stands the inn – an ancient stone building sadly out of repair. The painting on the sign-board is obliterated. The shutters over the long range of front windows are all closed. A cock and his hens are the only living creatures at the door. Plainly, this is one of the old inns of the stagecoach period, ruined by the railway. We pass through the open arched doorway, and find no one to welcome us. We advance into the stable yard behind; I assist my wife to dismount – and there we are in the position already disclosed to view at the opening of this narrative. No bell to ring. No human creature to answer when I call. I stand helpless, with the bridles of the horses in my hand. Mrs. Fairbank saunters gracefully down the length of the yard and does – what all women do, when they find themselves in a strange place. She opens every door as she passes it, and peeps in. On my side, I have just recovered my breath, I am on the point of shouting for the hostler for the third and last time, when I hear Mrs. Fairbank suddenly call to me:

“Percy! come here!”

Her voice is eager and agitated. She has opened a last door at the end of the yard, and has started back from some sight which has suddenly met her view. I hitch the horses’ bridles on a rusty nail in the wall near me, and join my wife. She has turned pale, and catches me nervously by the arm.

“Good heavens!” she cries; “look at that!”

I look – and what do I see?

I see a dingy little stable, containing two stalls. In one stall a horse is munching his corn. In the other a man is lying asleep on the litter.

A worn, withered, woebegone man in a hostler’s dress. His hollow wrinkled cheeks, his scanty grizzled hair, his dry yellow skin, tell their own tale of past sorrow or suffering. There is an ominous frown on his eyebrows – there is a painful nervous contraction on the side of his mouth. I hear him breathing convulsively when I first look in; he shudders and sighs in his sleep. It is not a pleasant sight to see, and I turn round instinctively to the bright sunlight in the yard. My wife turns me back again in the direction of the stable door.

“Wait!” she says. “Wait! he may do it again.”

“Do what again?”

“He was talking in his sleep, Percy, when I first looked in. He was dreaming some dreadful dream. Hush! he’s beginning again.”

I look and listen. The man stirs on his miserable bed. The man speaks in a quick, fierce whisper through his clinched teeth. “Wake up! Wake up, there! Murder!”

There is an interval of silence. He moves one lean arm slowly until it rests over his throat; he shudders, and turns on his straw; he raises his arm from his throat, and feebly stretches it out; his hand clutches at the straw on the side toward which he has turned; he seems to fancy that he is grasping at the edge of something. I see his lips begin to move again; I step softly into the stable; my wife follows me, with her hand fast clasped in mine. We both bend over him. He is talking once more in his sleep – strange talk, mad talk, this time.

“Light grey eyes” (we hear him say), “and a droop in the left eyelid – flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it – all right, mother! fair, white arms with a down on them – little, lady’s hand, with a reddish look round the fingernails – the knife – the cursed knife – first on one side, then on the other – aha, you she-devil! where is the knife?”

He stops and grows restless on a sudden. We see him writhing on the straw. He throws up both his hands and gasps hysterically for breath. His eyes open suddenly. For a moment they look at nothing, with a vacant glitter in them – then they close again in deeper sleep. Is he dreaming still? Yes; but the dream seems to have taken a new course. When he speaks next, the tone is altered; the words are few – sadly and imploringly repeated over and over again. “Say you love me! I am so fond of you. Say you love me! say you love me!” He sinks into deeper and deeper sleep, faintly repeating those words. They die away on his lips. He speaks no more.

By this time Mrs. Fairbank has got over her terror; she is devoured by curiosity now. The miserable creature on the straw has appealed to the imaginative side of her character. Her illimitable appetite for romance hungers and thirsts for more. She shakes me impatiently by the arm.

“Do you hear? There is a woman at the bottom of it, Percy! There is love and murder in it, Percy! Where are the people of the inn? Go into the yard, and call to them again.”

My wife belongs, on her mother’s side, to the South of France. The South of France breeds fine women with hot tempers. I say no more. Married men will understand my position. Single men may need to be told that there are occasions when we must not only love and honour – we must also obey – our wives.

I turn to the door to obey my wife, and find myself confronted by a stranger who has stolen on us unawares. The stranger is a tiny, sleepy, rosy old man, with a vacant pudding-face, and a shining bald head. He wears drab breeches and gaiters, and a respectable square-tailed ancient black coat. I feel instinctively that here is the landlord of the inn.

“Good morning, sir,” says the rosy old man. “I’m a little hard of hearing. Was it you that was a-calling just now in the yard?”

Before I can answer, my wife interposes. She insists (in a shrill voice, adapted to our host’s hardness of hearing) on knowing who that unfortunate person is sleeping on the straw. “Where does he come from? Why does he say such dreadful things in his sleep? Is he married or single? Did he ever fall in love with a murderess? What sort of a looking woman was she? Did she really stab him or not? In short, dear Mr. Landlord, tell us the whole story!”

Dear Mr. Landlord waits drowsily until Mrs. Fairbank has quite done – then delivers himself of his reply as follows:

“His name’s Francis Raven. He’s an Independent Methodist. He was forty-five year old last birthday. And he’s my hostler. That’s his story.”

My wife’s hot southern temper finds its way to her foot, and expresses itself by a stamp on the stable yard.

The landlord turns himself sleepily round, and looks at the horses. “A fine pair of horses, them two in the yard. Do you want to put ‘em in my stables?” I reply in the affirmative by a nod. The landlord, bent on making himself agreeable to my wife, addresses her once more. “I’m a-going to wake Francis Raven. He’s an Independent Methodist. He was forty-five year old last birthday. And he’s my hostler. That’s his story.”

Having issued this second edition of his interesting narrative, the landlord enters the stable. We follow him to see how he will wake Francis Raven, and what will happen upon that. The stable broom stands in a corner; the landlord takes it – advances toward the sleeping hostler – and coolly stirs the man up with a broom as if he was a wild beast in a cage. Francis Raven starts to his feet with a cry of terror – looks at us wildly, with a horrid glare of suspicion in his eyes – recovers himself the next moment – and suddenly changes into a decent, quiet, respectable serving-man.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. I beg your pardon, sir.”

The tone and manner in which he makes his apologies are both above his apparent station in life. I begin to catch the infection of Mrs. Fairbank’s interest in this man. We both follow him out into the yard to see what he will do with the horses. The manner in which he lifts the injured leg of the lame horse tells me at once that he understands his business. Quickly and quietly, he leads the animal into an empty stable; quickly and quietly, he gets a bucket of hot water, and puts the lame horse’s leg into it. “The warm water will reduce the swelling, sir. I will bandage the leg afterwards.” All that he does is done intelligently; all that he says, he says to the purpose.

Nothing wild, nothing strange about him now. Is this the same man whom we heard talking in his sleep? the same man who woke with that cry of terror and that horrid suspicion in his eyes? I determine to try him with one or two questions.

•   •   •   •   •

•  III  •

“Not much to do here,” I say to the hostler.

“Very little to do, sir,” the hostler replies.

“Anybody staying in the house?”

“The house is quite empty, sir.”

“I thought you were all dead. I could make nobody hear me.”

“The landlord is very deaf, sir, and the waiter is out on an errand.”

“Yes; and you were fast asleep in the stable. Do you often take a nap in the daytime?”

The worn face of the hostler faintly flushes. His eyes look away from my eyes for the first time. Mrs. Fairbank furtively pinches my arm. Are we on the eve of a discovery at last? I repeat my question. The man has no civil alternative but to give me an answer. The answer is given in these words:

“I was tired out, sir. You wouldn’t have found me asleep in the daytime but for that.”

“Tired out, eh? You had been hard at work, I suppose?”

“No, sir.”

“What was it, then?”

He hesitates again, and answers unwillingly, “I was up all night.”

“Up all night? Anything going on in the town?”

“Nothing going on, sir.”

“Anybody ill?”

“Nobody ill, sir.”

That reply is the last. Try as I may, I can extract nothing more from him. He turns away and busies himself in attending to the horse’s leg. I leave the stable to speak to the landlord about the carriage which is to take us back to Farleigh Hall. Mrs. Fairbank remains with the hostler, and favours me with a look at parting. The look says plainly, “I mean to find out why he was up all night. Leave him to Me.”

The ordering of the carriage is easily accomplished. The inn possesses one horse and one chaise. The landlord has a story to tell of the horse, and a story to tell of the chaise. They resemble the story of Francis Raven – with this exception, that the horse and chaise belong to no religious persuasion. “The horse will be nine year old next birthday. I’ve had the shay for four-and-twenty year. Mr. Max, of Underbridge, he bred the horse; and Mr. Pooley, of Yeovil, he built the shay. It’s my horse and my shay. And that’s their story!” Having relieved his mind of these details, the landlord proceeds to put the harness on the horse. By way of assisting him, I drag the chaise into the yard. Just as our preparations are completed, Mrs. Fairbank appears. A moment or two later the hostler follows her out. He has bandaged the horse’s leg, and is now ready to drive us to Farleigh Hall. I observe signs of agitation in his face and manner, which suggest that my wife has found her way into his confidence. I put the question to her privately in a corner of the yard. “Well? Have you found out why Francis Raven was up all night?”

Mrs. Fairbank has an eye to dramatic effect. Instead of answering plainly, Yes or No, she suspends the interest and excites the audience by putting a question on her side.

“What is the day of the month, dear?”

“The day of the month is the first of March.”

“The first of March, Percy, is Francis Raven’s birthday.”

I try to look as if I was interested – and don’t succeed.

“Francis was born,” Mrs. Fairbank proceeds gravely, “at two o’clock in the morning.”

I begin to wonder whether my wife’s intellect is going the way of the landlord’s intellect. “Is that all?” I ask.

“It is not all,” Mrs. Fairbank answers. “Francis Raven sits up on the morning of his birthday because he is afraid to go to bed.”

“And why is he afraid to go to bed?”

“Because he is in peril of his life.”

“On his birthday?”

“On his birthday. At two o’clock in the morning. As regularly as the birthday comes round.”

There she stops. Has she discovered no more than that? No more thus far. I begin to feel really interested by this time. I ask eagerly what it means? Mrs. Fairbank points mysteriously to the chaise – with Francis Raven (hitherto our hostler, now our coachman) waiting for us to get in. The chaise has a seat for two in front, and a seat for one behind. My wife casts a warning look at me, and places herself on the seat in front.

The necessary consequence of this arrangement is that Mrs. Fairbank sits by the side of the driver during a journey of two hours and more. Need I state the result? It would be an insult to your intelligence to state the result. Let me offer you my place in the chaise. And let Francis Raven tell his terrible story in his own words.

•   •   •   •   •

THE SECOND NARRATIVE.

THE HOSTLER’S STORY.
TOLD BY HIMSELF.

•  IV  •

It is now ten years ago since I got my first warning of the great trouble of my life in the Vision of a Dream.

I shall be better able to tell you about it if you will please suppose yourselves to be drinking tea along with us in our little cottage in Cambridgeshire, ten years since.

The time was the close of day, and there were three of us at the table, namely, my mother, myself, and my mother’s sister, Mrs. Chance. These two were Scotchwomen by birth, and both were widows. There was no other resemblance between them that I can call to mind. My mother had lived all her life in England, and had no more of the Scotch brogue on her tongue than I have. My aunt Chance had never been out of Scotland until she came to keep house with my mother after her husband’s death. And when she opened her lips you heard broad Scotch, I can tell you, if you ever heard it yet!

As it fell out, there was a matter of some consequence in debate among us that evening. It was this: whether I should do well or not to take a long journey on foot the next morning.

Now the next morning happened to be the day before my birthday; and the purpose of the journey was to offer myself for a situation as groom at a great house in the neighbouring county to ours. The place was reported as likely to fall vacant in about three weeks’ time. I was as well fitted to fill it as any other man. In the prosperous days of our family, my father had been manager of a training stable, and he had kept me employed among the horses from my boyhood upward. Please to excuse my troubling you with these small matters. They all fit into my story farther on, as you will soon find out.

My poor mother was dead against my leaving home on the morrow.

“You can never walk all the way there and all the way back again by tomorrow night,” she says. “The end of it will be that you will sleep away from home on your birthday. You have never done that yet, Francis, since your father’s death, I don’t like your doing it now. Wait a day longer, my son – only one day.”

For my own part, I was weary of being idle, and I couldn’t abide the notion of delay. Even one day might make all the difference. Some other man might take time by the forelock, and get the place.

“Consider how long I have been out of work,” I says, “and don’t ask me to put off the journey. I won’t fail you, mother. I’ll get back by tomorrow night, if I have to pay my last sixpence for a lift in a cart.”

My mother shook her head. “I don’t like it, Francis – I don’t like it!” There was no moving her from that view. We argued and argued, until we were both at a dead lock. It ended in our agreeing to refer the difference between us to my mother’s sister, Mrs. Chance.

While we were trying hard to convince each other, my aunt Chance sat as dumb as a fish, stirring her tea and thinking her own thoughts. When we made our appeal to her, she seemed as it were to wake up. “Ye baith refer it to my puir judgment?” she says, in her broad Scotch. We both answered Yes. Upon that my aunt Chance first cleared the tea-table, and then pulled out from the pocket of her gown a pack of cards.

Don’t run away, if you please, with the notion that this was done lightly, with a view to amuse my mother and me. My aunt Chance seriously believed that she could look into the future by telling fortunes on the cards. She did nothing herself without first consulting the cards. She could give no more serious proof of her interest in my welfare than the proof which she was offering now. I don’t say it profanely; I only mention the fact – the cards had, in some incomprehensible way, got themselves jumbled up together with her religious convictions. You meet with people nowadays who believe in spirits working by way of tables and chairs. On the same principle (if there is any principle in it) my aunt Chance believed in Providence working by way of the cards.

“Whether you are right, Francie, or your mither – whether ye will do weel or ill, the morrow, to go or stay – the cairds will tell it. We are a’ in the hands of Proavidence. The cairds will tell it.”

Hearing this, my mother turned her head aside, with something of a sour look in her face. Her sister’s notions about the cards were little better than flat blasphemy to her mind. But she kept her opinion to herself. My aunt Chance, to own the truth, had inherited, through her late husband, a pension of thirty pounds a year. This was an important contribution to our housekeeping, and we poor relations were bound to treat her with a certain respect. As for myself, if my poor father never did anything else for me before he fell into difficulties, he gave me a good education, and raised me (thank God) above superstitions of all sorts. However, a very little amused me in those days; and I waited to have my fortune told, as patiently as if I believed in it too!

My aunt began her hocus pocus by throwing out all the cards in the pack under seven. She shuffled the rest with her left hand for luck; and then she gave them to me to cut. “Wi’ yer left hand, Francie. Mind that! Pet your trust in Proavidence – but dinna forget that your luck’s in yer left hand!” A long and roundabout shifting of the cards followed, reducing them in number until there were just fifteen of them left, laid out neatly before my aunt in a half circle. The card which happened to lie outermost, at the right-hand end of the circle, was, according to rule in such cases, the card chosen to represent Me. By way of being appropriate to my situation as a poor groom out of employment, the card was – the King of Diamonds.

“I tak’ up the King o’ Diamants,” says my aunt. “I count seven cairds fra’ richt to left; and I humbly ask a blessing on what follows.” My aunt shut her eyes as if she was saying grace before meat, and held up to me the seventh card. I called the seventh card – the Queen of Spades. My aunt opened her eyes again in a hurry, and cast a sly look my way. “The Queen o’ Spades means a dairk woman. Ye’ll be thinking in secret, Francie, of a dairk woman?”

When a man has been out of work for more than three months, his mind isn’t troubled much with thinking of women – light or dark. I was thinking of the groom’s place at the great house, and I tried to say so. My aunt Chance wouldn’t listen. She treated my interpretation with contempt. “Hoot-toot! there’s the caird in your hand! If ye’re no thinking of her the day, ye’ll be thinking of her the morrow. Where’s the harm of thinking of a dairk woman! I was ance a dairk woman myself, before my hair was grey. Haud yer peace, Francie, and watch the cairds.”

I watched the cards as I was told. There were seven left on the table. My aunt removed two from one end of the row and two from the other, and desired me to call the two outermost of the three cards now left on the table. I called the Ace of Clubs and the Ten of Diamonds. My aunt Chance lifted her eyes to the ceiling with a look of devout gratitude which sorely tried my mother’s patience. The Ace of Clubs and the Ten of Diamonds, taken together, signified – first, good news (evidently the news of the groom’s place); secondly, a journey that lay before me (pointing plainly to my journey tomorrow!); thirdly and lastly, a sum of money (probably the groom’s wages!) waiting to find its way into my pockets. Having told my fortune in these encouraging terms, my aunt declined to carry the experiment any further. “Eh, lad! it’s a clean tempting o’ Proavidence to ask mair o’ the cairds than the cairds have tauld us noo. Gae yer ways tomorrow to the great hoose. A dairk woman will meet ye at the gate; and she’ll have a hand in getting ye the groom’s place, wi’ a’ the gratifications and pairquisites appertaining to the same. And, mebbe, when yer poaket’s full o’ money, ye’ll no’ be forgetting yer aunt Chance, maintaining her ain unblemished widowhood – wi’ Proavidence assisting – on thratty punds a year!”

I promised to remember my aunt Chance (who had the defect, by the way, of being a terribly greedy person after money) on the next happy occasion when my poor empty pockets were to be filled at last. This done, I looked at my mother. She had agreed to take her sister for umpire between us, and her sister had given it in my favour. She raised no more objections. Silently, she got on her feet, and kissed me, and sighed bitterly – and so left the room. My aunt Chance shook her head. “I doubt, Francie, yer puir mither has but a heathen notion of the vairtue of the cairds!”

By daylight the next morning I set forth on my journey. I looked back at the cottage as I opened the garden gate. At one window was my mother, with her handkerchief to her eyes. At the other stood my aunt Chance, holding up the Queen of Spades by way of encouraging me at starting. I waved my hands to both of them in token of farewell, and stepped out briskly into the road. It was then the last day of February. Be pleased to remember, in connection with this, that the first of March was the day, and two o’clock in the morning the hour of my birth.

•   •   •   •   •

•  V  •

Now you know how I came to leave home. The next thing to tell is, what happened on the journey.

I reached the great house in reasonably good time considering the distance. At the very first trial of it, the prophecy of the cards turned out to be wrong. The person who met me at the lodge gate was not a dark woman – in fact, not a woman at all – but a boy. He directed me on the way to the servants’ offices; and there again the cards were all wrong. I encountered, not one woman, but three – and not one of the three was dark. I have stated that I am not superstitious, and I have told the truth. But I must own that I did feel a certain fluttering at the heart when I made my bow to the steward, and told him what business had brought me to the house. His answer completed the discomfiture of aunt Chance’s fortune-telling. My ill-luck still pursued me. That very morning another man had applied for the groom’s place, and had got it.

I swallowed my disappointment as well as I could, and thanked the steward, and went to the inn in the village to get the rest and food which I sorely needed by this time.

Before starting on my homeward walk I made some inquiries at the inn, and ascertained that I might save a few miles, on my return, by following a new road. Furnished with full instructions, several times repeated, as to the various turnings I was to take, I set forth, and walked on till the evening with only one stoppage for bread and cheese. Just as it was getting toward dark, the rain came on and the wind began to rise; and I found myself, to make matters worse, in a part of the country with which I was entirely unacquainted, though I guessed myself to be some fifteen miles from home. The first house I found to inquire at, was a lonely roadside inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood. Solitary as the place looked, it was welcome to a lost man who was also hungry, thirsty, footsore, and wet. The landlord was civil and respectable-looking; and the price he asked for a bed was reasonable enough. I was grieved to disappoint my mother. But there was no conveyance to be had, and I could go no farther afoot that night. My weariness fairly forced me to stop at the inn.

I may say for myself that I am a temperate man. My supper simply consisted of some rashers of bacon, a slice of home-made bread, and a pint of ale. I did not go to bed immediately after this moderate meal, but sat up with the landlord, talking about my bad prospects and my long run of ill-luck, and diverging from these topics to the subjects of horse-flesh and racing. Nothing was said, either by myself, my host, or the few labourers who strayed into the tap-room, which could, in the slightest degree, excite my mind, or set my fancy – which is only a small fancy at the best of times – playing tricks with my common sense.

At a little after eleven the house was closed. I went round with the landlord, and held the candle while the doors and lower windows were being secured. I noticed with surprise the strength of the bolts, bars, and iron-sheathed shutters.

“You see, we are rather lonely here,” said the landlord. “We never have had any attempts to break in yet, but it’s always as well to be on the safe side. When nobody is sleeping here, I am the only man in the house. My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant girl takes after her missuses. Another glass of ale, before you turn in? – No! – Well, how such a sober man as you comes to be out of a place is more than I can understand for one. – Here’s where you’re to sleep. You’re the only lodger tonight, and I think you’ll say my missus has done her best to make you comfortable. You’re quite sure you won’t have another glass of ale? – Very well. Good night.”

It was half-past eleven by the clock in the passage as we went upstairs to the bedroom. The window looked out on the wood at the back of the house.

I locked my door, set my candle on the chest of drawers, and wearily got me ready for bed. The bleak wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was very dreary to hear through the night silence. Feeling strangely wakeful, I resolved to keep the candle alight until I began to grow sleepy. The truth is, I was not quite myself. I was depressed in mind by my disappointment of the morning; and I was worn out in body by my long walk. Between the two, I own I couldn’t face the prospect of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal moan of the wind in the wood.

Sleep stole on me before I was aware of it; my eyes closed, and I fell off to rest, without having so much as thought of extinguishing the candle.

The next thing that I remember was a faint shivering that ran through me from head to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at my heart, such as I had never felt before. The shivering only disturbed my slumbers – the pain woke me instantly. In one moment I passed from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness – my eyes wide open – my mind clear on a sudden as if by a miracle.

The candle had burned down nearly to the last morsel of tallow, but the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light was, for the moment, fair and full.

Between the foot of the bed and the closet door, I saw a person in my room. The person was a woman, standing looking at me, with a knife in her hand. It does no credit to my courage to confess it – but the truth is the truth. I was struck speechless with terror. There I lay with my eyes on the woman; there the woman stood (with the knife in her hand) with her eyes on me.

She said not a word as we stared each other in the face; but she moved after a little – moved slowly toward the left-hand side of the bed.

The light fell full on her face. A fair, fine woman, with yellowish flaxen hair, and light grey eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. I noticed these things and fixed them in my mind, before she was quite round at the side of the bed. Without saying a word; without any change in the stony stillness of her face; without any noise following her footfall, she came closer and closer; stopped at the bed-head; and lifted the knife to stab me. I laid my arm over my throat to save it; but, as I saw the blow coming, I threw my hand across the bed to the right side, and jerked my body over that way, just as the knife came down, like lightning, within a hair’s breadth of my shoulder.

My eyes fixed on her arm and her hand – she gave me time to look at them as she slowly drew the knife out of the bed. A white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly over the fair skin. A delicate lady’s hand, with a pink flush round the finger nails.

She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the bed; she stopped there for a moment looking at me; then she came on without saying a word; without any change in the stony stillness of her face; without any noise following her footfall – came on to the side of the bed where I now lay.

Getting near me, she lifted the knife again, and I drew myself away to the left side. She struck, as before right into the mattress, with a swift downward action of her arm; and she missed me, as before; by a hair’s breadth. This time my eyes wandered from her to the knife. It was like the large clasp knives which labouring men use to cut their bread and bacon with. Her delicate little fingers did not hide more than two thirds of the handle; I noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and shining as the blade was, and looking like new.

For the second time she drew the knife out of the bed, and suddenly hid it away in the wide sleeve of her gown. That done, she stopped by the bedside watching me. For an instant I saw her standing in that position – then the wick of the spent candle fell over into the socket. The flame dwindled to a little blue point, and the room grew dark.

A moment, or less, if possible, passed so – and then the wick flared up, smokily, for the last time. My eyes were still looking for her over the right-hand side of the bed when the last flash of light came. Look as I might, I could see nothing. The woman with the knife was gone.

I began to get back to myself again. I could feel my heart beating; I could hear the woeful moaning of the wind in the wood; I could leap up in bed, and give the alarm before she escaped from the house. “Murder! Wake up there! Murder!”

Nobody answered to the alarm. I rose and groped my way through the darkness to the door of the room. By that way she must have got in. By that way she must have gone out.

The door of the room was fast locked, exactly as I had left it on going to bed!

I looked at the window. Fast locked too!

Hearing a voice outside, I opened the door. There was the landlord, coming toward me along the passage, with his burning candle in one hand, and his gun in the other.

“What is it?” he says, looking at me in no very friendly way.

I could only answer in a whisper, “A woman, with a knife in her hand. In my room. A fair, yellow-haired woman. She jobbed at me with the knife, twice over.”

He lifted his candle, and looked at me steadily from head to foot.

“She seems to have missed you – twice over.”

“I dodged the knife as it came down. It struck the bed each time. Go in, and see.”

The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately. In less than a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.

“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife! There isn’t a mark in the bedclothes anywhere. What do you mean by coming into a man’s place and frightening his family out of their wits by a dream?”

A dream? The woman who had tried to stab me, not a living human being like myself? I began to shake and shiver. The horrors got hold of me at the bare thought of it.

“I’ll leave the house,” I said. “Better be out on the road in the rain and dark, than back in that room, after what I’ve seen in it. Lend me the light to get my clothes by, and tell me what I’m to pay.”

The landlord led the way back with his light into the bedroom. “Pay?” says he. “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go downstairs. I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got about you, if I had known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand. Look at the bed – where’s the cut of a knife in it? Look at the window – is the lock bursted? Look at the door (which I heard you fasten yourself) – is it broke in? A murdering woman with a knife in my house! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

My eyes followed his hand as it pointed first to the bed – then to the window – then to the door. There was no gainsaying it. The bed sheet was as sound as on the day it was made. The window was fast. The door hung on its hinges as steady as ever. I huddled my clothes on without speaking. We went downstairs together. I looked at the clock in the bar room. The time was twenty minutes past two in the morning. I paid my bill, and the landlord let me out. The rain had ceased; but the night was dark, and the wind was bleaker than ever. Little did the darkness, or the cold, or the doubt about the way home matter to me. My mind was away from all these things. My mind was fixed on the vision in the bedroom. What had I seen trying to murder me? The creature of a dream? Or that other creature from the world beyond the grave, whom men call ghost? I could make nothing of it as I walked along in the night; I had made nothing by it by midday – when I stood at last, after many times missing my road, on the doorstep of home.

•   •   •   •   •

•  VI  •

My mother came out alone to welcome me back. There were no secrets between us two. I told her all that had happened, just as I have told it to you.

She kept silence till I had done. And then she put a question to me.

“What time was it, Francis, when you saw the Woman in your Dream?”

I had looked at the clock when I left the inn, and I had noticed that the hands pointed to twenty minutes past two. Allowing for the time consumed in speaking to the landlord, and in getting on my clothes, I answered that I must have first seen the Woman at two o’clock in the morning. In other words, I had not only seen her on my birthday, but at the hour of my birth.

My mother still kept silence. Lost in her own thoughts, she took me by the hand, and led me into the parlour. Her writing-desk was on the table by the fireplace. She opened it, and signed to me to take a chair by her side.

“My son! your memory is a bad one, and mine is fast failing me. Tell me again what the woman looked like. I want her to be as well known to both of us, years hence, as she is now.”

I obeyed; wondering what strange fancy might be working in her mind. I spoke; and she wrote the words as they fell from my lips:

“Light grey eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. Flaxen hair, with a golden-yellow streak in it. White arms, with a down upon them. Little, lady’s hands, with a rosy-red look about the finger nails.”

“Did you notice how she was dressed, Francis?”

“No, mother.”

“Did you notice the knife?”

“Yes. A large clasp knife, with a buck-horn handle, as good as new.”

My mother added the description of the knife. Also the year, month, day of the week, and hour of the day when the Dream-Woman appeared to me at the inn. That done, she locked up the paper in her desk.

“Not a word, Francis, to your aunt. Not a word to any living soul. Keep your Dream a secret between you and me.”

The weeks passed, and the months passed. My mother never returned to the subject again. As for me, time, which wears out all things, wore out my remembrance of the Dream. Little by little, the image of the Woman grew dimmer and dimmer. Little by little, she faded out of my mind.

•   •   •   •   •

•  VII  •

The story of the warning is now told. Judge for yourself if it was a true warning or a false, when you hear what happened to me on my next birthday.

In the Summer time of the year, the Wheel of Fortune turned the right way for me at last. I was smoking my pipe one day, near an old stone quarry at the entrance to our village, when a carriage accident happened, which gave a new turn, as it were, to my lot in life. It was an accident of the commonest kind – not worth mentioning at any length. A lady driving herself; a runaway horse; a cowardly manservant in attendance, frightened out of his wits; and the stone quarry too near to be agreeable – that is what I saw, all in a few moments, between two whiffs of my pipe. I stopped the horse at the edge of the quarry, and got myself a little hurt by the shaft of the chaise. But that didn’t matter. The lady declared I had saved her life; and her husband, coming with her to our cottage the next day, took me into his service then and there. The lady happened to be of a dark complexion; and it may amuse you to hear that my aunt Chance instantly pitched on that circumstance as a means of saving the credit of the cards. Here was the promise of the Queen of Spades performed to the very letter, by means of “a dark woman,” just as my aunt had told me. “In the time to come, Francis, beware o’ pettin’ yer ain blinded intairpretation on the cairds. Ye’re ower ready, I trow, to murmur under dispensation of Proavidence that ye canna fathom – like the Eesraelites of auld. I’ll say nae mair to ye. Mebbe when the money’s powering into yer poakets, ye’ll no forget yer aunt Chance, left like a sparrow on the housetop, wi’ a sma’ annuitee o’ thratty punds a year.”

I remained in my situation (at the West-end of London) until the Spring of the New Year.

About that time, my master’s health failed. The doctors ordered him away to foreign parts, and the establishment was broken up. But the turn in my luck still held good. When I left my place, I left it – thanks to the generosity of my kind master – with a yearly allowance granted to me, in remembrance of the day when I had saved my mistress’s life. For the future, I could go back to service or not, as I pleased; my little income was enough to support my mother and myself.

My master and mistress left England towards the end of February. Certain matters of business to do for them detained me in London until the last day of the month. I was only able to leave for our village by the evening train, to keep my birthday with my mother as usual. It was bedtime when I got to the cottage; and I was sorry to find that she was far from well. To make matters worse, she had finished her bottle of medicine on the previous day, and had omitted to get it replenished, as the doctor had strictly directed. He dispensed his own medicines, and I offered to go and knock him up. She refused to let me do this; and, after giving me my supper, sent me away to my bed.

I fell asleep for a little, and woke again. My mother’s bedchamber was next to mine. I heard my aunt Chance’s heavy footsteps going to and fro in the room, and, suspecting something wrong, knocked at the door. My mother’s pains had returned upon her; there was a serious necessity for relieving her sufferings as speedily as possible, I put on my clothes, and ran off, with the medicine-bottle in my hand, to the other end of the village, where the doctor lived. The church clock chimed the quarter to two on my birthday just as I reached his house. One ring of the night bell brought him to his bedroom window to speak to me. He told me to wait, and he would let me in at the surgery door. I noticed, while I was waiting, that the night was wonderfully fair and warm for the time of year. The old stone quarry where the carriage accident had happened was within view. The moon in the clear heavens lit it up almost as bright as day.

In a minute or two the doctor let me into the surgery. I closed the door, noticing that he had left his room very lightly clad. He kindly pardoned my mother’s neglect of his directions, and set to work at once at compounding the medicine. We were both intent on the bottle; he filling it, and I holding the light – when we heard the surgery door suddenly opened from the street.

•   •   •   •   •

•  VIII  •

Who could possibly be up and about in our quiet village at the second hour of the morning?

The person who opened the door appeared within range of the light of the candle. To complete our amazement, the person proved to be a woman!

She walked up to the counter, and standing side-by-side with me, lifted her veil. At the moment when she showed her face, I heard the church clock strike two. She was a stranger to me, and a stranger to the doctor. She was also, beyond all comparison, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.

“I saw the light under the door,” she said. “I want some medicine.”

She spoke quite composedly, as if there was nothing at all extraordinary in her being out in the village at two in the morning, and following me into the surgery to ask for medicine! The doctor stared at her as if he suspected his own eyes of deceiving him. “Who are you?” he asked. “How do you come to be wandering about at this time in the morning?”

She paid no heed to his questions. She only told him coolly what she wanted.

“I have got a bad toothache. I want a bottle of laudanum.”

The doctor recovered himself when she asked for the laudanum. He was on his own ground, you know, when it came to a matter of laudanum; and he spoke to her smartly enough this time.

“Oh, you have got the toothache, have you? Let me look at the tooth.”

She shook her head, and laid a two-shilling piece on the counter.

“I won’t trouble you to look at the tooth,” she said. “There is the money. Let me have the laudanum, if you please.”

The doctor put the two-shilling piece back again in her hand.

“I don’t sell laudanum to strangers,” he answered. “If you are in any distress of body or mind, that is another matter. I shall be glad to help you.”

She put the money back in her pocket. “You can’t help me,” she said, as quietly as ever. “Good morning.”

With that, she opened the surgery door to go out again into the street.

So far, I had not spoken a word on my side. I had stood with the candle in my hand (not knowing I was holding it) – with my eyes fixed on her, with my mind fixed on her like a man bewitched. Her looks betrayed, even more plainly than her words, her resolution, in one way or another, to destroy herself. When she opened the door, in my alarm at what might happen I found the use of my tongue.

“Stop!” I cried out. “Wait for me. I want to speak to you before you go away.”

She lifted her eyes with a look of careless surprise and a mocking smile on her lips.

“What can you have to say to me?” She stopped, and laughed to herself. “Why not?” she said. “I have got nothing to do, and nowhere to go.” She turned back a step, and nodded to me. “You’re a strange man – I think I’ll humour you – I’ll wait outside.” The door of the surgery closed on her. She was gone.

I am ashamed to own what happened next. The only excuse for me is that I was really and truly a man bewitched. I turned me round to follow her out, without once thinking of my mother. The doctor stopped me.

“Don’t forget the medicine,” he said. “And if you will take my advice, don’t trouble yourself about that woman. Rouse up the constable. It’s his business to look after her – not yours.”

I held out my hand for the medicine in silence: I was afraid I should fail in respect if I trusted myself to answer him. He must have seen, as I saw, that she wanted the laudanum to poison herself. He had, to my mind, taken a very heartless view of the matter. I just thanked him when he gave me the medicine – and went out.

She was waiting for me as she had promised; walking slowly to and fro – a tall, graceful, solitary figure in the bright moonbeams. They shed over her fair complexion, her bright golden hair, her large grey eyes, just the light that suited them best. She looked hardly mortal when she first turned to speak to me.

“Well?” she said. “And what do you want?”

In spite of my pride, or my shyness, or my better sense – whichever it might me – all my heart went out to her in a moment. I caught hold of her by the hands, and owned what was in my thoughts, as freely as if I had known her for half a lifetime.

“You mean to destroy yourself,” I said. “And I mean to prevent you from doing it. If I follow you about all night, I’ll prevent you from doing it.”

She laughed. “You saw yourself that he wouldn’t sell me the laudanum. Do you really care whether I live or die?” She squeezed my hands gently as she put the question: her eyes searched mine with a languid, lingering look in them that ran through me like fire. My voice died away on my lips; I couldn’t answer her.

She understood, without my answering. “You have given me a fancy for living, by speaking kindly to me,” she said. “Kindness has a wonderful effect on women, and dogs, and other domestic animals. It is only men who are superior to kindness. Make your mind easy – I promise to take as much care of myself as if I was the happiest woman living! Don’t let me keep you here, out of your bed. Which way are you going?”

Miserable wretch that I was, I had forgotten my mother – with the medicine in my hand!

“I am going home,” I said. “Where are you staying? At the inn?”

She laughed her bitter laugh, and pointed to the stone quarry. “There is my inn for tonight,” she said. “When I got tired of walking about, I rested there.”

We walked on together, on my way home. I took the liberty of asking her if she had any friends.

“I thought I had one friend left,” she said, “or you would never have met me in this place. It turns out I was wrong. My friend’s door was closed in my face some hours since; my friend’s servants threatened me with the police. I had nowhere else to go, after trying my luck in your neighbourhood; and nothing left but my two-shilling piece and these rags on my back. What respectable innkeeper would take me into his house? I walked about, wondering how I could find my way out of the world without disfiguring myself, and without suffering much pain. You have no river in these parts. I didn’t see my way out of the world, till I heard you ringing at the doctor’s house. I got a glimpse at the bottles in the surgery, when he let you in, and I thought of the laudanum directly. What were you doing there? Who is that medicine for? Your wife?”

“I am not married!”

She laughed again. “Not married! If I was a little better dressed there might be a chance for me. Where do you live? Here?”

We had arrived, by this time, at my mother’s door. She held out her hand to say good-bye. Houseless and homeless as she was, she never asked me to give her a shelter for the night. It was my proposal that she should rest, under my roof, unknown to my mother and my aunt. Our kitchen was built out at the back of the cottage: she might remain there unseen and unheard until the household was astir in the morning. I led her into the kitchen, and set a chair for her by the dying embers of the fire. I dare say I was to blame – shamefully to blame, if you like. I only wonder what you would have done in my place. On your word of honour as a man, would you have let that beautiful creature wander back to the shelter of the stone quarry like a stray dog? God help the woman who is foolish enough to trust and love you, if you would have done that!

I left her by the fire, and went to my mother’s room.

•   •   •   •   •

•  IX  •

If you have ever felt the heartache, you will know what I suffered in secret when my mother took my hand, and said, “I am sorry, Francis, that your night’s rest has been disturbed through me.” I gave her the medicine; and I waited by her till the pains abated. My aunt Chance went back to her bed; and my mother and I were left alone. I noticed that her writing-desk, moved from its customary place, was on the bed by her side. She saw me looking at it. “This is your birthday, Francis,” she said. “Have you anything to tell me?” I had so completely forgotten my Dream, that I had no notion of what was passing in her mind when she said those words. For a moment there was a guilty fear in me that she suspected something. I turned away my face, and said, “No, mother; I have nothing to tell.” She signed to me to stoop down over the pillow and kiss her. “God bless you, my love!” she said; “and many happy returns of the day.” She patted my hand, and closed her weary eyes, and, little by little, fell off peaceably into sleep.

I stole downstairs again. I think the good influence of my mother must have followed me down. At any rate, this is true: I stopped with my hand on the closed kitchen door, and said to myself: “Suppose I leave the house, and leave the village, without seeing her or speaking to her more?”

Should I really have fled from temptation in this way, if I had been left to myself to decide? Who can tell? As things were, I was not left to decide. While my doubt was in my mind, she heard me, and opened the kitchen door. My eyes and her eyes met. That ended it.

We were together, unsuspected and undisturbed, for the next two hours. Time enough for her to reveal the secret of her wasted life. Time enough for her to take possession of me as her own, to do with me as she liked. It is needless to dwell here on the misfortunes which had brought her low; they are misfortunes too common to interest anybody.

Her name was Alicia Warlock. She had been born and bred a lady. She had lost her station, her character, and her friends. Virtue shuddered at the sight of her; and Vice had got her for the rest of her days. Shocking and common, as I told you. It made no difference to me. I have said it already – I say it again – I was a man bewitched. Is there anything so very wonderful in that? Just remember who I was. Among the honest women in my own station in life, where could I have found the like of her? Could they walk as she walked? and look as she looked? When they gave me a kiss, did their lips linger over it as hers did? Had they her skin, her laugh, her foot, her hand, her touch? She never had a speck of dirt on her: I tell you her flesh was a perfume. When she embraced me, her arms folded round me like the wings of angels; and her smile covered me softly with its light like the sun in heaven. I leave you to laugh at me, or to cry over me, just as your temper may incline. I am not trying to excuse myself – I am trying to explain. You are gentlefolks; what dazzled and maddened me, is everyday experience to you. Fallen or not, angel or devil, it came to this – she was a lady; and I was a groom.

Before the house was astir, I got her away (by the workmen’s train) to a large manufacturing town in our parts.

Here – with my savings in money to help her – she could get her outfit of decent clothes and her lodging among strangers who asked no questions so long as they were paid. Here – now on one pretence and now on another – I could visit her, and we could both plan together what our future lives were to be. I need not tell you that I stood pledged to make her my wife. A man in my station always marries a woman of her sort.

Do you wonder if I was happy at this time? I should have been perfectly happy but for one little drawback. It was this: – I was never quite at my ease in the presence of my promised wife.

I don’t mean that I was shy with her, or suspicious of her, or ashamed of her. The uneasiness I am speaking of was caused by a faint doubt in my mind whether I had not seen her somewhere, before the morning when we met at the doctor’s house. Over and over again, I found myself wondering whether her face did not remind me of some other face – what other I never could tell. This strange feeling, this one question that could never be answered, vexed me to a degree that you would hardly credit. It came between us at the strangest times – oftenest, however, at night, when the candles were lit. You have known what it is to try and remember a forgotten name – and to fail, search as you may, to find it in your mind. That was my case. I failed to find my lost face, just as you failed to find your lost name.

In three weeks we had talked matters over, and had arranged how I was to make a clean breast of it at home. By Alicia’s advice, I was to describe her as having been one of my fellow-servants during the time I was employed under my kind master and mistress in London. There was no fear now of my mother taking any harm from the shock of a great surprise. Her health had improved during the three weeks’ interval. On the first evening when she was able to take her old place at tea-time, I summoned my courage, and told her I was going to be married. The poor soul flung her arms round my neck, and burst out crying for joy. “Oh, Francis!” she says, “I am so glad you will have somebody to comfort you and care for you when I am gone!” As for my aunt Chance, you can anticipate what she did, without being told. Ah, me! If there had really been any prophetic virtue in the cards, what a terrible warning they might have given us that night!

It was arranged that I was to bring my promised wife to dinner at the cottage on the next day.

•   •   •   •   •

•  X  •

I own I was proud of Alicia when I led her into our little parlour at the appointed time. She had never, to my mind, looked so beautiful as she looked that day. I never noticed any other woman’s dress: I noticed hers as carefully as if I had been a woman myself! She wore a black silk gown, with plain collar and cuffs, and a modest lavender-coloured bonnet, with one white rose in it placed at the side. My mother, dressed in her Sunday best, rose up, all in a flutter, to welcome her daughter-in-law that was to be. She walked forward a few steps, half smiling, half in tears – she looked Alicia full in the face – and suddenly stood still. Her cheeks turned white in an instant; her eyes stared in horror; her hands dropped helplessly at her sides. She staggered back, and fell into the arms of my aunt, standing behind her. It was no swoon – she kept her senses. Her eyes turned slowly from Alicia to me. “Francis,” she said, “does that woman’s face remind you of nothing?”.

Before I could answer, she pointed to her writing-desk on the table at the fireside. “Bring it!” she cried, “bring it!”.

At the same moment I felt Alicia’s hand on my shoulder, and saw Alicia’s face red with anger – and no wonder!

“What does this mean?” she asked. “Does your mother want to insult me?”

I said a few words to quiet her; what they were I don’t remember – I was so confused and astonished at the time. Before I had done, I heard my mother behind me.

My aunt had fetched her desk. She had opened it; she had taken a paper from it. Step by step, helping herself along by the wall, she came nearer and nearer, with the paper in her hand. She looked at the paper – she looked in Alicia’s face – she lifted the long, loose sleeve of her gown, and examined her hand and arm. I saw fear suddenly take the place of anger in Alicia’s eyes. She shook herself free of my mother’s grasp. “Mad!” she said to herself, “and Francis never told me!” With those words she ran out of the room.

I was hastening out after her, when my mother signed to me to stop. She read the words written on the paper. While they fell slowly, one by one, from her lips, she pointed toward the open door.

“Light grey eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. Flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it. White arms, with a down upon them. Little, lady’s hand, with a rosy-red look about the fingernails. The Dream-Woman, Francis! The Dream-Woman!”

Something darkened the parlour window as those words were spoken. I looked sidelong at the shadow. Alicia Warlock had come back! She was peering in at us over the low window-blind. There was the fatal face which had first looked at me in the bedroom of the lonely inn. There, resting on the window blind, was the lovely little hand which had held the murderous knife. I had seen her before we met in the village. The Dream-Woman! The Dream-Woman!

•   •   •   •   •

•  XI  •

I expect nobody to approve of what I have next to tell of myself. In three weeks from the day when my mother had identified her with the Woman of the Dream, I took Alicia Warlock to church, and made her my wife. I was a man bewitched. Again and again I say it – I was a man bewitched!

During the interval before my marriage, our little household at the cottage was broken up. My mother and my aunt quarrelled. My mother, believing in the Dream, entreated me to break off my engagement. My aunt, believing in the cards, urged me to marry.

This difference of opinion produced a dispute between them, in the course of which my aunt Chance – quite unconscious of having any superstitious feelings of her own – actually set out the cards which prophesied happiness to me in my married life, and asked my mother how anybody but “a blinded heathen could be fule enough, after seeing those cairds, to believe in a dream!” This was, naturally, too much for my mother’s patience; hard words followed on either side; Mrs. Chance returned in dudgeon to her friends in Scotland. She left me a written statement of my future prospects, as revealed by the cards, and with it an address at which a post-office order would reach her. “The day was not that far off,” she remarked, “when Francie might remember what he owed to his aunt Chance, maintaining her ain unbleemished widowhood on thratty punds a year.”

Having refused to give her sanction to my marriage, my mother also refused to be present at the wedding, or to visit Alicia afterwards. There was no anger at the bottom of this conduct on her part. Believing as she did in this Dream, she was simply in mortal fear of my wife. I understood this, and I made allowances for her. Not a cross word passed between us. My one happy remembrance now – though I did disobey her in the matter of my marriage – is this: I loved and respected my good mother to the last.

As for my wife, she expressed no regret at the estrangement between her mother-in-law and herself. By common consent, we never spoke on that subject. We settled in the manufacturing town which I have already mentioned, and we kept a lodging-house. My kind master, at my request, granted me a lump sum in place of my annuity. This put us into a good house, decently furnished. For a while things went well enough. I may describe myself at this time of my life as a happy man.

My misfortunes began with a return of the complaint with which my mother had already suffered. The doctor confessed, when I asked him the question, that there was danger to be dreaded this time. Naturally, after hearing this, I was a good deal away at the cottage. Naturally also, I left the business of looking after the house, in my absence, to my wife. Little by little, I found her beginning to alter toward me. While my back was turned, she formed acquaintances with people of the doubtful and dissipated sort. One day, I observed something in her manner which forced the suspicion on me that she had been drinking. Before the week was out, my suspicion was a certainty. From keeping company with drunkards, she had grown to be a drunkard herself.

I did all a man could do to reclaim her. Quite useless! She had never really returned the love I felt for her: I had no influence; I could do nothing. My mother, hearing of this last worse trouble, resolved to try what her influence could do. Ill as she was, I found her one day dressed to go out.

“I am not long for this world, Francis,” she said. “I shall not feel easy on my deathbed, unless I have done my best to the last to make you happy. I mean to put my own fears and my own feelings out of the question, and go with you to your wife, and try what I can do to reclaim her. Take me home with you, Francis. Let me do all I can to help my son, before it is too late.”

How could I disobey her? We took the railway to the town: it was only half an hour’s ride. By one o’clock in the afternoon we reached my house. It was our dinner hour, and Alicia was in the kitchen. I was able to take my mother quietly into the parlour and then to prepare my wife for the visit. She had drunk but little at that early hour; and, luckily, the devil in her was tamed for the time.

She followed me into the parlour, and the meeting passed off better than I had ventured to forecast; with this one drawback, that my mother – though she tried hard to control herself – shrank from looking my wife in the face when she spoke to her. It was a relief to me when Alicia began to prepare the table for dinner.

She laid the cloth, brought in the bread tray, and cut some slices for us from the loaf. Then she returned to the kitchen. At that moment, while I was still anxiously watching my mother, I was startled by seeing the same ghastly change pass over her face which had altered it in the morning when Alicia and she first met. Before I could say a word, she started up with a look of horror.

“Take me back! – home, home again, Francis! Come with me, and never go back more!”

I was afraid to ask for an explanation; I could only sign her to be silent, and help her quickly to the door. As we passed the bread tray on the table, she stopped and pointed to it.

“Did you see what your wife cut your bread with?” she asked.

“No, mother; I was not noticing. What was it?”

“Look!”

I did look. A new clasp knife, with a buck-horn handle, lay with the loaf in the bread-tray. I stretched out my hand to possess myself of it. At the same moment, there was a noise in the kitchen, and my mother caught me by the arm.

“The knife of the Dream! Francis, I’m faint with fear – take me away before she comes back!”

I couldn’t speak to comfort or even to answer her. Superior as I was to superstition, the discovery of the knife staggered me. In silence, I helped my mother out of the house; and took her home.

I held out my hand to say good-bye. She tried to stop me.

“Don’t go back, Francis! don’t go back!”.

“I must get the knife, mother. I must go back by the next train.”

I held to that resolution. By the next train I went back.

•   •   •   •   •

•  XII  •

My wife had, of course, discovered our secret departure from the house. She had been drinking. She was in a fury of passion. The dinner in the kitchen was flung under the grate; the cloth was off the parlour table. Where was the knife?

I was foolish enough to ask for it. She refused to give it to me. In the course of the dispute between us which followed, I discovered that there was a horrible story attached to the knife. It had been used in a murder – years since – and had been so skilfully hidden that the authorities had been unable to produce it at the trial. By help of some of her disreputable friends, my wife had been able to purchase this relic of a bygone crime. Her perverted nature set some horrid unacknowledged value on the knife. Seeing there was no hope of getting it by fair means, I determined to search for it, later in the day, in secret. The search was unsuccessful. Night came on, and I left the house to walk about the streets. You will understand what a broken man I was by this time, when I tell you I was afraid to sleep in the same room with her!

Three weeks passed. Still she refused to give up the knife; and still that fear of sleeping in the same room with her possessed me. I walked about at night, or dozed in the parlour, or sat watching by my mother’s bedside. Before the end of the first week in the new month, the worst misfortune of all befell me – my mother died. It wanted then but a short time to my birthday. She had longed to live till that day. I was present at her death. Her last words in this world were addressed to me.

“Don’t go back, my son – don’t go back!”

I was obliged to go back, if it was only to watch my wife. In the last days of my mother’s illness she had spitefully added a sting to my grief by declaring she would assert her right to attend the funeral. In spite of all that I could do or say, she held to her word. On the day appointed for the burial she forced herself – inflamed and shameless with drink, into my presence, and swore she would walk in the funeral procession to my mother’s grave.

This last insult – after all I had gone through already – was more than I could endure. It maddened me. Try to make allowances for a man beside himself. I struck her.

The instant the blow was dealt, I repented it. She crouched down, silent, in a corner of the room, and eyed me steadily. It was a look that cooled my hot blood in an instant. There was no time now to think of making atonement. I could only risk the worst, and make sure of her till the funeral was over. I locked her into her bedroom.

When I came back, after laying my mother in the grave, I found her sitting by the bedside, very much altered in look and bearing, with a bundle on her lap. She faced me quietly; she spoke with a curious stillness in her voice – strangely and unnaturally composed in look and manner.

“No man has ever struck me yet,” she said. “My husband shall have no second opportunity. Set the door open, and let me go.”

She passed me, and left the room. I saw her walk away up the street.

Was she gone for good?

All that night I watched and waited. No footstep came near the house. The next night, overcome with fatigue, I lay down on the bed in my clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning. My slumber was not disturbed. The third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, passed, and nothing happened. I lay down on the seventh night, still suspicious of something happening; still in my clothes; still with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning.

My rest was disturbed. I awoke twice, without any sensation of uneasiness. The third time, that horrid shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that awful sinking pain at the heart, came back again, and roused me in an instant.

My eyes turned to the left-hand side of the bed. And there stood, looking at me—

The Dream Woman again? No! My wife. The living woman, with the face of the Dream – in the attitude of the Dream – the fair arm up; the knife clasped in the delicate white hand.

I sprang upon her on the instant; but not quickly enough to stop her from hiding the knife. Without a word from me, without a cry from her, I pinioned her in a chair. With one hand I felt up her sleeve; and there, where the Dream Woman had hidden the knife, my wife had hidden it – the knife with the buck-horn handle, that looked like new.

What I felt when I made that discovery I could not realize at the time, and I can’t describe now. I took one steady look at her with the knife in my hand.

“You meant to kill me?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered; “I meant to kill you.” She crossed her arms over her bosom, and stared me coolly in the face. “I shall do it yet,” she said. “With that knife.”

I don’t know what possessed me – I swear to you I am no coward; and yet I acted like a coward. The horrors got hold of me. I couldn’t look at her – I couldn’t speak to her. I left her (with the knife in my hand), and went out into the night.

There was a bleak wind abroad, and the smell of rain was in the air. The church clocks chimed the quarter as I walked beyond the last house in the town. I asked the first policeman I met what hour that was, of which the quarter past had just struck.

The man looked at his watch, and answered, “Two o’clock.” Two in the morning. What day of the month was this day that had just begun? I reckoned it up from the date of my mother’s funeral. The horrid parallel between the dream and the reality was complete – it was my birthday!

Had I escaped the mortal peril which the dream foretold? or had I only received a second warning?

As that doubt crossed my mind I stopped on my way out of the town. The air had revived me – I felt in some degree like my own self again. After a little thinking, I began to see plainly the mistake I had made in leaving my wife free to go where she liked and to do as she pleased.

I turned instantly, and made my way back to the house.

It was still dark. I had left the candle burning in the bedchamber. When I looked up to the window of the room now, there was no light in it. I advanced to the house door. On going away, I remembered to have closed it; on trying it now, I found it open.

I waited outside, never losing sight of the house till daylight. Then I ventured indoors – listened, and heard nothing – looked into the kitchen, scullery, parlour, and found nothing – went up at last into the bedroom. It was empty.

A pick-lock lay on the floor, which told me how she had gained entrance in the night. And that was the one trace I could find of the Dream-Woman.

•   •   •   •   •

•  XIII  •

I waited in the house till the town was astir for the day, and then I went to consult a lawyer. In the confused state of my mind at the time, I had one clear notion of what I meant to do: I was determined to sell my house and leave the neighbourhood. There were obstacles in the way which I had not counted on. I was told I had creditors to satisfy before I could leave – I, who had given my wife the money to pay my bills regularly every week! Inquiry showed that she had embezzled every farthing of the money I had entrusted to her. I had no choice but to pay over again.

Placed in this awkward position, my first duty was to set things right, with the help of my lawyer. During my forced sojourn in the town I did two foolish things. And, as a consequence that followed, I heard once more, and heard for the last time, of my wife.

In the first place, having got possession of the knife, I was rash enough to keep it in my pocket. In the second place, having something of importance to say to my lawyer, at a late hour of the evening, I went to his house after dark – alone and on foot. I got there safely enough. Returning, I was seized on from behind by two men: dragged down a passage and robbed – not only of the little money I had about me, but also of the knife. It was the lawyer’s opinion (as it was mine) that the thieves were among the disreputable acquaintances formed by my wife, and that they had attacked me at her instigation. To confirm this view I received a letter the next day, without date or address, written in Alicia’s hand. The first line informed me that the knife was back again in her possession. The second line reminded me of the day when I struck her. The third line warned me that she would wash out the stain of that blow in my blood, and repeated the words, “I shall do it with the knife!”

These things happened a year ago. The law laid hands on the men who had robbed me; but from that time to this, the law has failed completely to find a trace of my wife.

My story is told. When I had paid the creditors and paid the legal expenses, I had barely five pounds left out of the sale of my house; and I had the world to begin over again. Some months since – drifting here and there – I found my way to Underbridge. The landlord of the inn had known something of my father’s family in times past. He gave me (all he had to give) my food, and shelter in the yard. Except on market-days, there is nothing to do. In the coming winter the inn is to be shut up, and I shall have to shift for myself. My old master would help me if I applied to him – but I don’t like to apply: he has done more for me already than I deserve. Besides, in another year who knows but my troubles may all be at an end? Next winter will bring me nigh to my next birthday, and my next birthday may be the day of my death. Yes! it’s true I sat up all last night; and I heard two in the morning strike: and nothing happened. Still, allowing for that, the time to come is a time I don’t trust. My wife has got the knife – my wife is looking for me. I am above superstition, mind! I don’t say I believe in dreams; I only say, Alicia Warlock is looking for me. It is possible I may be wrong. It is possible I may be right. Who can tell?

•   •   •   •   •

THE THIRD NARRATIVE

THE STORY CONTINUED
BY PERCY FAIRBANK.

•  XIV  •

We took leave of Francis Raven at the door of Farleigh Hall, with the understanding that he might expect to hear from us again.

The same night Mrs. Fairbank and I had a discussion in the sanctuary of our own room. The topic was “The Ostler’s Story;” and the question in dispute between us turned on the measure of charitable duty that we owed to the ostler himself.

The view I took of the man’s narrative was of the purely matter-of-fact kind. Francis Raven had, in my opinion, brooded over the misty connection between his strange dream and his vile wife, until his mind was in a state of partial delusion on that subject. I was quite willing to help him with a trifle of money, and to recommend him to the kindness of my lawyer, if he was really in any danger and wanted advice. There my idea of my duty toward this afflicted person began and ended.

Confronted with this sensible view of the matter, Mrs. Fairbank’s romantic temperament rushed, as usual, into extremes. “I should no more think of losing sight of Francis Raven when his next birthday comes round,” says my wife, “than I should think of laying down a good story with the last chapters unread. I am positively determined, Percy, to take him back with us when we return to France, in the capacity of groom. What does one man more or less among the horses matter to people as rich as we are?” In this strain the partner of my joys and sorrows ran on, perfectly impenetrable to everything that I could say on the side of common sense. Need I tell my married brethren how it ended? Of course I allowed my wife to irritate me, and spoke to her sharply. Of course my wife turned her face away indignantly on the conjugal pillow, and burst into tears. Of course upon that, “Mr.” made his excuses, and “Mrs.” had her own way.

Before the week was out we rode over to Underbridge, and duly offered to Francis Raven a place in our service as supernumerary groom.

At first the poor fellow seemed hardly able to realise his own extraordinary good fortune. Recovering himself, he expressed his gratitude modestly and becomingly. Mrs. Fairbank’s ready sympathies overflowed, as usual, at her lips. She talked to him about our home in France, as if the worn, grey-headed ostler had been a child. “Such a dear old house, Francis; and such pretty gardens! Stables ten times as big as your stables here: quite a choice of rooms for you. You must learn the name of our house – Maison Rouge. Our nearest town is Metz. We are within a walk of the beautiful River Moselle. And when we want a change we have only to take the railway to the frontier, and find ourselves in Germany.”

Listening, so far, with a very bewildered face, Francis started and changed colour when my wife reached the end of her last sentence. “Germany?” he repeated.

“Yes. Does Germany remind you of anything?”

The ostler’s eyes looked down sadly on the ground. “Germany reminds me of my wife,” he replied.

“Indeed! How?”

“She once told me she had lived in Germany – long before I knew her – in the time when she was a young girl.”

“Was she living with relations or friends?”

“She was living as governess in a foreign family.”

“In what part of Germany?”

“I don’t remember, ma’am. I doubt if she told me.”

“Did she tell you the name of the family?”

“Yes, ma’am. It was a foreign name, and it has slipped my memory long since. The head of the family was a wine-grower in a large way of business – I remember that.”

“Did you hear what sort of wine he grew? There are wine growers in our neighbourhood. Was it Moselle wine?”

“I couldn’t say, ma’am, I doubt if I ever heard.”

There the conversation dropped. We engaged to communicate with Francis Raven before we left England, and took our leave.

I had made arrangements to pay our round of visits to English friends, and to return to Maison Rouge in the summer. On the eve of departure, certain difficulties in connection with the management of some landed property of mine in Ireland obliged us to alter our plans. Instead of getting back to our house in France in the Summer, we only returned a week or two before Christmas. Francis Raven accompanied us, and was duly established, in the nominal capacity of stable keeper, among the servants at Maison Rouge.

Before long, some of the objections to taking him into our employment, which I had foreseen and had vainly mentioned to my wife, forced themselves on our attention in no very agreeable form.

Francis Raven failed (as I had feared he would) to get on smoothly with his fellow-servants They were all French; and not one of them understood English. Francis, on his side, was equally ignorant of French. His reserved manners, his melancholy temperament, his solitary ways – all told against him. Our servants called him “the English Bear.” He grew widely known in the neighbourhood under his nickname. Quarrels took place, ending once or twice in blows. It became plain, even to Mrs. Fairbank herself, that some wise change must be made. While we were still considering what the change was to be, the unfortunate ostler was thrown on our hands for some time to come by an accident in the stables. Still pursued by his proverbial ill-luck, the poor wretch’s leg was broken by a kick from a horse.

He was attended to by our own surgeon, in his comfortable bedroom at the stables. As the date of his birthday drew near, he was still confined to his bed.

Physically speaking, he was doing very well. Morally speaking, the surgeon was not satisfied. Francis Raven was suffering under some mysterious mental disturbance, which interfered seriously with his rest at night. Hearing this, I thought it my duty to tell the medical attendant what was preying on the patient’s mind. As a practical man, he shared my opinion that the ostler was in a state of delusion on the subject of his Wife and his Dream. “Curable delusion, in my opinion,” the surgeon added, “if the experiment could be fairly tried.”

“How can it be tried?” I asked.

Instead of replying, the surgeon put a question to me, on his side.

“Do you happen to know,” he said, “that this year is Leap Year?”

“Mrs. Fairbank reminded me of it yesterday,” I answered. “Otherwise I might not have known it.”

“Do you think Francis Raven knows that this year is Leap Year?”

(I began to see dimly what my friend was driving at.)

“It depends,” I answered, “on whether he has got an English almanack. Suppose he has not got the almanack – what then?”

“In that case,” pursued the surgeon, “Francis Raven is innocent of all suspicion that there is a twenty-ninth day in February this year. As a necessary consequence – what will he do? He will anticipate the appearance of the Woman with the Knife, at two in the morning of the twenty-ninth of February, instead of the first of March. Let him suffer all his superstitious terrors on the wrong day. Leave him, on the day that is really his birthday, to pass a perfectly quiet night, and to be as sound asleep as other people at two in the morning. And then, when he wakes comfortably in time for his breakfast, shame him out of his delusion by telling him the truth.”

I agreed to try the experiment. Leaving the surgeon to caution Mrs. Fairbank on the subject of Leap Year, I went to the stables to see Mr. Raven.

•   •   •   •   •

•  XV  •

The poor fellow was full of forebodings of the fate in store for him on the ominous first of March. He eagerly entreated me to order one of the menservants to sit up with him on the birthday morning. In granting his request, I asked him to tell me on which day of the week his birthday fell. He reckoned the days on his fingers; and proved his innocence of all suspicion that it was Leap Year, by fixing on the twenty-ninth of February, in the full persuasion that it was the first of March. Pledged to try the surgeon’s experiment, I left his error uncorrected, of course. In so doing, I took my first step blindfold toward the last act in the drama of the Ostler’s Dream.

The next day brought with it a little domestic difficulty, which indirectly and strangely associated itself with the coming end.

My wife received a letter, inviting us to assist in celebrating the “Silver Wedding” of two worthy German neighbours of ours – Mr. and Mrs. Beldheimer. Mr. Beldheimer was a large wine-grower on the banks of the Moselle. His house was situated on the frontier line of France and Germany; and the distance from our house was sufficiently considerable to make it necessary for us to sleep under our host’s roof. Under these circumstances, if we accepted the invitation, a comparison of dates showed that we should be away from home on the morning of the first of March. Mrs. Fairbank – holding to her absurd resolution to see with her own eyes what might, or might not, happen to Francis Raven on his birthday – flatly declined to leave Maison Rouge. “It’s easy to send an excuse,” she said, in her off-hand manner.

I failed, for my part, to see any easy way out of the difficulty. The celebration of a “Silver Wedding” in Germany is the celebration of twenty-five years of happy married life; and the host’s claim upon the consideration of his friends on such an occasion is something in the nature of a royal “command.” After considerable discussion, finding my wife’s obstinacy invincible, and feeling that the absence of both of us from the festival would certainly offend our friends, I left Mrs. Fairbank to make her excuses for herself, and directed her to accept the invitation so far as I was concerned. In so doing, I took my second step, blindfold, toward the last act in the drama of the Ostler’s Dream.

A week elapsed; the last days of February were at hand. Another domestic difficulty happened; and, again, this event also proved to be strangely associated with the coming end.

My head groom at the stables was one Joseph Rigobert. He was an ill-conditioned fellow, inordinately vain of his personal appearance, and by no means scrupulous in his conduct with women. His one virtue consisted of his fondness for horses, and in the care he took of the animals under his charge. In a word, he was too good a groom to be easily replaced, or he would have quitted my service long since. On the occasion of which I am now writing, he was reported to me by my steward as growing idle and disorderly in his habits. The principal offence alleged against him was, that he had been seen that day in the city of Metz, in the company of a woman (supposed to be an Englishwoman), whom he was entertaining at a tavern, when he ought to have been on his way back to Maison Rouge. The man’s defence was that “the lady” (as he called her) was an English stranger, unacquainted with the ways of the place, and that he had only shown her where she could obtain some refreshments at her own request. I administered the necessary reprimand, without troubling myself to inquire further into the matter. In failing to do this, I took my third step, blindfold, toward the last act in the drama of the Ostler’s Dream.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth, I informed the servants at the stables that one of them must watch through the night by the Englishman’s bedside. Joseph Rigobert immediately volunteered for the duty – as a means, no doubt, of winning his way back to my favour. I accepted his proposal.

That day the surgeon dined with us. Toward midnight he and I left the smoking-room, and repaired to Francis Raven’s bedside. Rigobert was at his post, with no very agreeable expression on his face. The Frenchman and the Englishman had evidently not got on well together so far. Francis Raven lay helpless on his bed, waiting silently for two in the morning and the Dream-Woman.

“I have come, Francis, to bid you good night,” I said, cheerfully. “Tomorrow morning I shall look in at breakfast time, before I leave home on a journey.”

“Thank you for all your kindness, sir. You will not see me alive tomorrow morning. She will find me this time. Mark my words – she will find me this time.”

“My good fellow! she couldn’t find you in England. How in the world is she to find you in France?”

“It’s borne in on my mind, sir, that she will find me here. At two in the morning on my birthday I shall see her again, and see her for the last time.”

“Do you mean that she will kill you?”

“I mean that, sir, she will kill me – with the knife.”

“And with Rigobert in the room to protect you?”

“I am a doomed man. Fifty Rigoberts couldn’t protect me.”

“And you wanted somebody to sit up with you?”

“Mere weakness, sir. I don’t like to be left alone on my deathbed.”

I looked at the surgeon. If he had encouraged me, I should certainly, out of sheer compassion, have confessed to Francis Raven the trick that we were playing him. The surgeon held to his experiment; the surgeon’s face plainly said – “No.”

The next day (the twenty-ninth of February) was the day of the “Silver Wedding.” The first thing in the morning, I went to Francis Raven’s room. Rigobert met me at the door.

“How has he passed the night?” I asked.

“Saying his prayers, and looking for ghosts,” Rigobert answered. “A lunatic asylum is the only proper place for him.”

I approached the bedside. “Well, Francis, here you are, safe and sound, in spite of what you said to me last night.”

His eyes rested on mine with a vacant, wondering look.

“I don’t understand it,” he said.

“Did you see anything of your wife when the clock struck two?”

“No, sir.”

“Did anything happen?”

“Nothing happened, sir.”

“Doesn’t this satisfy you that you were wrong?”

His eyes still kept their vacant, wondering look. He only repeated the words he had spoken already:

“I don’t understand it.”

I made a last attempt to cheer him. “Come, come, Francis! keep a good heart. You will be out of bed in a fortnight.”

He shook his head on the pillow. “There’s something wrong,” he said. “I don’t expect you to believe me, sir. I only say there’s something wrong – and time will show it.”

I left the room. Half an hour later I started for Mr. Beldheimer’s house; leaving the arrangements for the morning of the first of March in the hands of the doctor and my wife.

•   •   •   •   •

•  XVI  •

The one thing which principally struck me when I joined the guests at the “Silver Wedding” is also the one thing which it is necessary to mention here. On this joyful occasion a noticeable lady present was out of spirits. That lady was no other than the heroine of the festival, the mistress of the house!

In the course of the evening I spoke to Mr. Beldheimer’s eldest son on the subject of his mother. As an old friend of the family, I had a claim on his confidence which the young man willingly recognised.

“We have had a very disagreeable matter to deal with,” he said; “and my mother has not recovered the painful impression left on her mind. Many years since, when my sisters were children, we had an English governess in the house. She left us, as we then understood, to be married. We heard no more of her until a week or ten days since, when my mother received a letter, in which our ex-governess described herself as being in a condition of great poverty and distress. After much hesitation she had ventured – at the suggestion of a lady who had been kind to her – to write to her former employers, and to appeal to their remembrance of old times. You know my mother: she is not only the most kind-hearted, but the most innocent of women – it is impossible to persuade her of the wickedness that there is in the world. She replied by return of post, inviting the governess to come here and see her, and enclosing the money for her travelling expenses. When my father came home, and heard what had been done, he wrote at once to his agent in London to make inquiries, enclosing the address on the governess’ letter. Before he could receive the agent’s reply the governess arrived. She produced the worst possible impression on his mind. The agent’s letter, arriving a few days later, confirmed his suspicions. Since we had lost sight of her, the woman had led a most disreputable life. My father spoke to her privately: he offered – on condition of her leaving the house – a sum of money to take her back to England. If she refused, the alternative would be an appeal to the authorities and a public scandal. She accepted the money, and left the house. On her way back to England she appears to have stopped at Metz. You will understand what sort of woman she is when I tell you that she was seen the other day in a tavern, with your handsome groom, Joseph Rigobert.”

While my informant was relating these circumstances, my memory was at work. I recalled what Francis Raven had vaguely told us of his wife’s experience in former days as governess in a German family. A suspicion of the truth suddenly flashed across my mind. “What was the woman’s name?” I asked.

Mr. Beldheimer’s son answered:

“Alicia Warlock.”

I had but one idea when I heard that reply – to get back to my house without a moment’s needless delay. It was then ten o’clock at night – the last train to Metz had left long since. I arranged with my young friend – after duly informing him of the circumstances – that I should go by the first train in the morning, instead of staying to breakfast with the other guests who slept in the house.

At intervals during the night I wondered uneasily how things were going on at Maison Rouge. Again and again the same question occurred to me, on my journey home in the early morning – the morning of the first of March. As the event proved, but one person in my house knew what really happened at the stables on Francis Raven’s birthday. Let Joseph Rigobert take my place as narrator, and tell the story of the end to You – as he told it, in times past, to his lawyer and to Me.

•   •   •   •   •

FOURTH (AND LAST) NARRATIVE.

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH RIGOBERT:
ADDRESSED TO THE ADVOCATE
WHO DEFENDED HIM AT HIS TRIAL

Respected Sir, – On the twenty-seventh of February I was sent, on business connected with the stables at Maison Rouge, to the city of Metz. On the public promenade I met a magnificent woman. Complexion, blonde. Nationality, English. We mutually admired each other; we fell into conversation. (She spoke French perfectly – with the English accent.) I offered refreshment; my proposal was accepted. We had a long and interesting interview – we discovered that we were made for each other. So far, Who is to blame?

Is it my fault that I am a handsome man – universally agreeable as such to the fair sex? Is it a criminal offence to be accessible to the amiable weakness of love? I ask again, Who is to blame? Clearly, nature. Not the beautiful lady – not my humble self.

To resume. The most hard-hearted person living will understand that two beings made for each other could not possibly part without an appointment to meet again.

I made arrangements for the accommodation of the lady in the village near Maison Rouge. She consented to honour me with her company at supper, in my apartment at the stables, on the night of the twenty-ninth. The time fixed on was the time when the other servants were accustomed to retire – eleven o’clock.

Among the grooms attached to the stables was an Englishman, laid up with a broken leg. His name was Francis. His manners were repulsive; he was ignorant of the French language. In the kitchen he went by the nickname of the “English Bear.” Strange to say, he was a great favourite with my master and my mistress. They even humoured certain superstitious terrors to which this repulsive person was subject – terrors into the nature of which I, as an advanced freethinker, never thought it worth my while to inquire.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth the Englishman, being a prey to the terrors which I have mentioned, requested that one of his fellow servants might sit up with him for that night only. The wish that he expressed was backed by Mr. Fairbank’s authority. Having already incurred my master’s displeasure – in what way, a proper sense of my own dignity forbids me to relate – I volunteered to watch by the bedside of the English Bear. My object was to satisfy Mr. Fairbank that I bore no malice, on my side, after what had occurred between us. The wretched Englishman passed a night of delirium. Not understanding his barbarous language, I could only gather from his gesture that he was in deadly fear of some fancied apparition at his bedside. From time to time, when this madman disturbed my slumbers, I quieted him by swearing at him. This is the shortest and best way of dealing with persons in his condition.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Mr. Fairbank left us on a journey.

Later in the day, to my unspeakable disgust, I found that I had not done with the Englishman yet. In Mr. Fairbank’s absence, Mrs. Fairbank took an incomprehensible interest in the question of my delirious fellow servant’s repose at night. Again, one or the other of us was to watch at his bedside, and report it, if anything happened. Expecting my fair friend to supper, it was necessary to make sure that the other servants at the stables would be safe in their beds that night. Accordingly, I volunteered once more to be the man who kept watch. Mrs. Fairbank complimented me on my humanity. I possess great command over my feelings. I accepted the compliment without a blush.

Twice, after nightfall, my mistress and the doctor (the last staying in the house in Mr. Fairbank’s absence) came to make inquiries. Once before the arrival of my fair friend – and once after. On the second occasion (my apartment being next door to the Englishman’s) I was obliged to hide my charming guest in the harness room. She consented, with angelic resignation, to immolate her dignity to the servile necessities of my position. A more amiable woman (so far) I never met with!

After the second visit I was left free. It was then close on midnight. Up to that time there was nothing in the behaviour of the mad Englishman to reward Mrs. Fairbank and the doctor for presenting themselves at his bedside. He lay half awake, half asleep, with an odd wondering kind of look in his face. My mistress at parting warned me to be particularly watchful of him toward two in the morning. The doctor (in case anything happened) left me a large hand bell to ring, which could easily be heard at the house.

Restored to the society of my fair friend, I spread the supper-table. A pâté, a sausage, and a few bottles of generous Moselle wine, composed our simple meal. When persons adore each other, the intoxicating illusion of Love transforms the simplest meal into a banquet. With immeasurable capacities for enjoyment, we sat down to table. At the very moment when I placed my fascinating companion in a chair, the infamous Englishman in the next room took that occasion, of all others, to become restless and noisy once more. He struck with his stick on the floor; he cried out, in a delirious access of terror, “Rigobert! Rigobert!”

The sound of that lamentable voice, suddenly assailing our ears, terrified my fair friend. She lost all her charming colour in an instant. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Who is that in the next room?”

“A mad Englishman.”

“An Englishman?”

“Compose yourself, my angel. I will quiet him.”

The lamentable voice called out on me again, “Rigobert! Rigobert!”

My fair friend caught me by the arm. “Who is he?” she cried. “What is his name?”

Something in her face struck me as she put that question. A spasm of jealousy shook me to the soul. “You know him?” I said.

“His name!” she vehemently repeated; “his name!”

“Francis,” I answered.

“Francis – what?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I could neither remember nor pronounce the barbarous English surname. I could only tell her it began with an “R.”

She dropped back into the chair. Was she going to faint? No: she recovered, and more than recovered, her lost colour. Her eyes flashed superbly. What did it mean? Profoundly as I understand women in general, I was puzzled by this woman!

“You know him?” I repeated.

She laughed at me. “What nonsense! How should I know him? Go and quiet the wretch.”

My looking-glass was near. One glance at it satisfied me that no woman in her senses could prefer the Englishman to Me. I recovered my self-respect. I hastened to the Englishman’s bedside.

The moment I appeared he pointed eagerly toward my room. He overwhelmed me with a torrent of words in his own language. I made out, from his gestures and his looks, that he had, in some incomprehensible manner, discovered the presence of my guest; and, stranger still, that he was scared by the idea of a person in my room. I endeavoured to compose him on the system which I have already mentioned – that is to say, I swore at him in my language. The result not proving satisfactory, I own I shook my fist in his face, and left the bedchamber.

Returning to my fair friend, I found her walking backward and forward in a state of excitement wonderful to behold. She had not waited for me to fill her glass – she had begun the generous Moselle in my absence. I prevailed on her with difficulty to place herself at the table. Nothing would induce her to eat. “My appetite is gone,” she said. “Give me wine.”

The generous Moselle deserves its name – delicate on the palate, with prodigious “body.” The strength of this fine wine produced no stupefying effect on my remarkable guest. It appeared to strengthen and exhilarate her – nothing more. She always spoke in the same low tone, and always, turn the conversation as I might, brought it back with the same dexterity to the subject of the Englishman in the next room. In any other woman this persistency would have offended me. My lovely guest was irresistible; I answered her questions with the docility of a child. She possessed all the amusing eccentricity of her nation. When I told her of the accident which confined the Englishman to his bed, she sprang to her feet. An extraordinary smile irradiated her countenance. She said, “Show me the horse who broke the Englishman’s leg! I must see that horse!” I took her to the stables. She kissed the horse – on my word of honour, she kissed the horse! That struck me. I said. “You do know the man; and he has wronged you in some way.” No! she would not admit it, even then. “I kiss all beautiful animals,” she said. “Haven’t I kissed you?” With that charming explanation of her conduct, she ran back up the stairs. I only remained behind to lock the stable door again. When I rejoined her, I made a startling discovery. I caught her coming out of the Englishman’s room.

“I was just going downstairs again to call you,” she said. “The man in there is getting noisy once more.”

The mad Englishman’s voice assailed our ears once again.

“Rigobert! Rigobert!”

He was a frightful object to look at when I saw him this time. His eyes were staring wildly; the perspiration was pouring over his face. In a panic of terror he clasped his hands; he pointed up to heaven. By every sign and gesture that a man can make, he entreated me not to leave him again. I really could not help smiling. The idea of my staying with him, and leaving my fair friend by herself in the next room!

I turned to the door. When the mad wretch saw me leaving him he burst out into a screech of despair – so shrill that I feared it might awaken the sleeping servants.

My presence of mind in emergencies is proverbial among those who know me. I tore open the cupboard in which he kept his linen – seized a handful of his handkerchiefs – gagged him with one of them, and secured his hands with the others. There was now no danger of his alarming the servants. After tying the last knot, I looked up.

The door between the Englishman’s room and mine was open. My fair friend was standing on the threshold – watching him as he lay helpless on the bed; watching me as I tied the last knot.

“What are you doing there?” I asked. “Why did you open the door?”

She stepped up to me, and whispered her answer in my ear, with her eyes all the time upon the man on the bed:

“I heard him scream.”

“Well?”

“I thought you had killed him.”

I drew back from her in horror. The suspicion of me which her words implied was sufficiently detestable in itself. But her manner when she uttered the words was more revolting still. It so powerfully affected me that I started back from that beautiful creature as I might have recoiled from a reptile crawling over my flesh.

Before I had recovered myself sufficiently to reply, my nerves were assailed by another shock. I suddenly heard my mistress’s voice calling to me from the stable yard.

There was no time to think – there was only time to act. The one thing needed was to keep Mrs. Fairbank from ascending the stairs, and discovering – not my lady-guest only – but the Englishman also, gagged and bound on his bed. I instantly hurried to the yard. As I ran down the stairs I heard the stable clock strike the quarter to two in the morning.

My mistress was eager and agitated. The doctor (in attendance on her) was smiling to himself, like a man amused at his own thoughts.

“Is Francis awake or asleep?” Mrs. Fairbank inquired.

“He has been a little restless, madam. But he is now quiet again. If he is not disturbed” (I added those words to prevent her from ascending the stairs), “he will soon fall off into a quiet sleep.”

“Has nothing happened since I was here last?”

“Nothing, madam.”

The doctor lifted his eyebrows with a comical look of distress.

“Alas, alas, Mrs. Fairbank!” he said. “Nothing has happened! The days of romance are over!”

“It is not two o’clock yet,” my mistress answered, a little irritably.

The smell of the stables was strong on the morning air. She put her handkerchief to her nose and led the way out of the yard by the north entrance – the entrance communicating with the gardens and the house. I was ordered to follow her, along with the doctor. Once out of the smell of the stables she began to question me again. She was unwilling to believe that nothing had occurred in her absence. I invented the best answers I could think of on the spur of the moment; and the doctor stood by laughing. So the minutes passed till the clock struck two. Upon that, Mrs. Fairbank announced her intention of personally visiting the Englishman in his room. To my great relief, the doctor interfered to stop her from doing this.

“You have heard that Francis is just falling asleep,” he said. “If you enter his room you may disturb him. It is essential to the success of my experiment that he should have a good night’s rest, and that he should own it himself, before I tell him the truth. I must request, madam, that you will not disturb the man. Rigobert will ring the alarm bell if anything happens.”

My mistress was unwilling to yield. For the next five minutes, at least, there was a warm discussion between the two. In the end Mrs. Fairbank was obliged to give way – for the time. “In half an hour,” she said, “Francis will either be sound asleep, or awake again. In half an hour I shall come back.” She took the doctor’s arm. They returned together to the house.

Left by myself, with half an hour before me, I resolved to take the Englishwoman back to the village – then, returning to the stables, to remove the gag and the bindings from Francis, and to let him screech to his heart’s content. What would his alarming the whole establishment matter to me after I had got rid of the compromising presence of my guest?

Returning to the yard I heard a sound like the creaking of an open door on its hinges. The gate of the north entrance I had just closed with my own hand. I went round to the west entrance, at the back of the stables. It opened on a field crossed by two footpaths in Mr. Fairbank’s grounds. The nearest footpath led to the village. The other led to the highroad and the river.

Arriving at the west entrance I found the door open – swinging to and fro slowly in the fresh morning breeze. I had myself locked and bolted that door after admitting my fair friend at eleven o’clock. A vague dread of something wrong stole its way into my mind. I hurried back to the stables.

I looked into my own room. It was empty. I went to the harness room. Not a sign of the woman was there. I returned to my room, and approached the door of the Englishman’s bedchamber. Was it possible that she had remained there during my absence? An unaccountable reluctance to open the door made me hesitate, with my hand on the lock. I listened. There was not a sound inside. I called softly. There was no answer. I drew back a step, still hesitating. I noticed something dark moving slowly in the crevice between the bottom of the door and the boarded floor. Snatching up the candle from the table, I held it low, and looked. The dark, slowly-moving object was a stream of blood!

That horrid sight roused me. I opened the door.

The Englishman lay on his bed – alone in the room. He was stabbed in two places – in the throat and in the heart. The weapon was left in the second wound. It was a knife of English manufacture, with a handle of buck-horn as good as new.

I instantly gave the alarm. Witnesses can speak to what followed. It is monstrous to suppose that I am guilty of the murder. I admit that I am capable of committing follies: but I shrink from the bare idea of a crime. Besides, I had no motive for killing the man. The woman murdered him in my absence. The woman escaped by the west entrance while I was talking to my mistress. I have no more to say. I swear to you what I have here written is a true statement of all that happened on the morning of the first of March.

Accept, sir, the assurance of my sentiments of profound gratitude and respect.

Joseph Rigobert

•   •   •   •   •

LAST LINES.

ADDED BY PERCY FAIRBANK.

pagebrkbefore

Tried for the murder of Francis Raven, Joseph Rigobert was found Not Guilty; the papers of the assassinated man presenting ample evidence of the deadly animosity felt towards him by his wife.

The investigations pursued on the morning when the crime was committed showed that the murderess, after leaving the stable, had taken the footpath which led to the river. The river was dragged – without result. It remains doubtful to this day whether she died by drowning or not. The one thing certain is – that Alicia Warlock was never seen again.

So – beginning in mystery, ending in mystery – the Dream-Woman passes from your view. Ghost; demon; or living human creature – say for yourselves which she is. Or, knowing what unfathomed wonders are around you, what unfathomed wonders are in you, let the wise words of the greatest of all poets he explanation enough:

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.”

•  THE END  •

BROTHER MORGAN’S STORY
OF THE DREAM-WOMAN

(Excerpted from
The Queen of Hearts)

•  I  •

I had not been settled much more than six weeks in my country practice when I was sent for to a neighbouring town, to consult with the resident medical man there on a case of very dangerous illness.

My horse had come down with me at the end of a long ride the night before, and had hurt himself, luckily, much more than he had hurt his master. Being deprived of the animal’s services, I started for my destination by the coach (there were no railways at that time), and I hoped to get back again, toward the afternoon, in the same way.

After the consultation was over, I went to the principal inn of the town to wait for the coach. When it came up it was full inside and out. There was no resource left me but to get home as cheaply as I could by hiring a gig. The price asked for this accommodation struck me as being so extortionate, that I determined to look out for an inn of inferior pretensions, and to try if I could not make a better bargain with a less prosperous establishment.

I soon found a likely-looking house, dingy and quiet, with an old-fashioned sign, that had evidently not been repainted for many years past. The landlord, in this case, was not above making a small profit, and as soon as we came to terms he rang the yard-bell to order the gig.

“Has Robert not come back from that errand?” asked the landlord, appealing to the waiter who answered the bell.

“No, sir, he hasn’t.”

“Well, then, you must wake up Isaac.”

“Wake up Isaac!” I repeated; “that sounds rather odd. Do your hostlers go to bed in the daytime?”

“This one does,” said the landlord, smiling to himself in rather a strange way.

“And dreams too,” added the waiter; “I shan’t forget the turn it gave me the first time I heard him.”

“Never you mind about that,” retorted the proprietor; “you go and rouse Isaac up. The gentleman’s waiting for his gig.”

The landlord’s manner and the waiter’s manner expressed a great deal more than they either of them said. I began to suspect that I might be on the trace of something professionally interesting to me as a medical man, and I thought I should like to look at the hostler before the waiter awakened him.

“Stop a minute,” I interposed; “I have rather a fancy for seeing this man before you wake him up. I’m a doctor; and if this queer sleeping and dreaming of his comes from anything wrong in his brain, I may be able to tell you what to do with him.”

“I rather think you will find his complaint past all doctoring, sir,” said the landlord; “but, if you would like to see him, you’re welcome, I’m sure.”

He led the way across a yard and down a passage to the stables, opened one of the doors, and, waiting outside himself, told me to look in.

I found myself in a two-stall stable. In one of the stalls a horse was munching his corn; in the other an old man was lying asleep on the litter.

I stooped and looked at him attentively. It was a withered, woebegone face. The eyebrows were painfully contracted; the mouth was fast set, and drawn down at the corners.

The hollow wrinkled cheeks, and the scanty grizzled hair, told their own tale of some past sorrow or suffering. He was drawing his breath convulsively when I first looked at him, and in a moment more he began to talk in his sleep.

“Wake up!” I heard him say, in a quick whisper, through his clinched teeth. “Wake up there! Murder!”

He moved one lean arm slowly till it rested over his throat, shuddered a little, and turned on his straw. Then the arm left his throat, the hand stretched itself out, and clutched at the side toward which he had turned, as if he fancied himself to be grasping at the edge of something. I saw his lips move, and bent lower over him. He was still talking in his sleep.

“Light grey eyes,” he murmured, “and a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it – all right, mother – fair white arms, with a down on them – little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the finger nails. The knife – always the cursed knife – first on one side, then on the other. Aha! you she-devil, where’s the knife?”

At the last word his voice rose, and he grew restless on a sudden. I saw him shudder on the straw; his withered face became distorted, and he threw up both his hands with a quick hysterical gasp. They struck against the bottom of the manger under which he lay, and the blow awakened him. I had just time to slip through the door and close it before his eyes were fairly open, and his senses his own again.

“Do you know anything about that man’s past life?” I said to the landlord.

“Yes, sir, I know pretty well all about it,” was the answer, “and an uncommon queer story it is. Most people don’t believe it. It’s true, though, for all that. Why, just look at him,” continued the landlord, opening the stable door again. “Poor devil! he’s so worn out with his restless nights that he’s dropped back into his sleep already.”

“Don’t wake him,” I said; “I’m in no hurry for the gig. Wait till the other man comes back from his errand; and, in the meantime, suppose I have some lunch and a bottle of sherry, and suppose you come and help me to get through it?”

The heart of mine host, as I had anticipated, warmed to me over his own wine. He soon became communicative on the subject of the man asleep in the stable, and by little and little I drew the whole story out of him. Extravagant and incredible as the events must appear to everybody, they are related here just as I heard them and just as they happened.

•   •   •   •   •

•  II  •

Some years ago there lived in the suburbs of a large seaport town on the west coast of England a man in humble circumstances, by name Isaac Scatchard. His means of subsistence were derived from any employment that he could get as an hostler, and occasionally, when times went well with him, from temporary engagements in service as stable-helper in private houses. Though a faithful, steady, and honest man, he got on badly in his calling. His ill luck was proverbial among his neighbours. He was always missing good opportunities by no fault of his own, and always living longest in service with amiable people who were not punctual payers of wages. “Unlucky Isaac” was his nickname in his own neighbourhood, and no one could say that he did not richly deserve it.

With far more than one man’s fair share of adversity to endure, Isaac had but one consolation to support him, and that was of the dreariest and most negative kind. He had no wife and children to increase his anxieties and add to the bitterness of his various failures in life. It might have been from mere insensibility, or it might have been from generous unwillingness to involve another in his own unlucky destiny, but the fact undoubtedly was, that he had arrived at the middle term of life without marrying, and, what is much more remarkable, without once exposing himself, from eighteen to eight-and-thirty, to the genial imputation of ever having had a sweetheart.

When he was out of service he lived alone with his widowed mother. Mrs. Scatchard was a woman above the average in her lowly station as to capacity and manners. She had seen better days, as the phrase is, but she never referred to them in the presence of curious visitors; and, though perfectly polite to every one who approached her, never cultivated any intimacies among her neighbours. She contrived to provide, hardly enough, for her simple wants by doing rough work for the tailors, and always managed to keep a decent home for her son to return to whenever his ill luck drove him out helpless into the world.

One bleak autumn when Isaac was getting on fast toward forty and when he was as usual out of place through no fault of his own, he set forth, from his mother’s cottage on a long walk inland to a gentleman’s seat where he had heard that a stable-helper was required.

It wanted then but two days of his birthday; and Mrs. Scatchard, with her usual fondness, made him promise, before he started, that he would be back in time to keep that anniversary with her, in as festive a way as their poor means would allow. It was easy for him to comply with this request, even supposing he slept a night each way on the road.

He was to start from home on Monday morning, and, whether he got the new place or not, he was to be back for his birthday dinner on Wednesday at two o’clock.

Arriving at his destination too late on the Monday night to make application for the stable-helper’s place, he slept at the village inn, and in good time on the Tuesday morning presented himself at the gentleman’s house to fill the vacant situation. Here again his ill luck pursued him as inexorably as ever. The excellent written testimonials to his character which he was able to produce availed him nothing; his long walk had been taken in vain: only the day before the stable-helper’s place had been given to another man.

Isaac accepted this new disappointment resignedly and as a matter of course. Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men with sluggishly-working mental powers. He thanked the gentleman’s steward with his usual quiet civility for granting him an interview, and took his departure with no appearance of unusual depression in his face or manner.

Before starting on his homeward walk he made some inquiries at the inn, and ascertained that he might save a few miles on his return by following the new road. Furnished with full instructions, several times repeated, as to the various turnings he was to take, he set forth on his homeward journey and walked on all day with only one stoppage for bread and cheese. Just as it was getting toward dark, the rain came on and the wind began to rise, and he found himself, to make matters worse, in a part of the country with which he was entirely unacquainted, though he knew himself to be some fifteen miles from home. The first house he found to inquire at was a lonely roadside inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood. Solitary as the place looked, it was welcome to a lost man who was also hungry, thirsty, footsore and wet. The landlord was civil and respectable-looking, and the price he asked for a bed was reasonable enough. Isaac therefore decided on stopping comfortably at the inn for that night.

He was constitutionally a temperate man.

His supper consisted of two rashers of bacon, a slice of home-made bread and a pint of ale. He did not go to bed immediately after this moderate meal, but sat up with the landlord, talking about his bad prospects and his long run of ill-luck, and diverging from these topics to the subjects of horseflesh and racing. Nothing was said either by himself, his host, or the few labourers who strayed into the tap-room, which could, in the slightest degree, excite the very small and very dull imaginative faculty which Isaac Scatchard possessed.

At a little after eleven the house was closed. Isaac went round with the landlord and held the candle while the doors and lower windows were being secured. He noticed with surprise the strength of the bolts and bars, and iron-sheathed shutters.

“You see, we are rather lonely here,” said the landlord. “We never have had any attempts made to break in yet, but it’s always as well to be on the safe side. When nobody is sleeping here, I am the only man in the house. My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant-girl takes after her missuses. Another glass of ale before you turn in? No! Well, how such a sober man as you comes to be out of place is more than I can make out, for one. Here’s where you’re to sleep. You’re our only lodger tonight, and I think you’ll say my missus has done her best to make you comfortable. You’re quite sure you won’t have another glass of ale? Very well. Good-night.”

It was half-past eleven by the clock in the passage as they went upstairs to the bedroom, the window of which looked on to the wood at the back of the house.

Isaac locked the door, set his candle on the chest of drawers, and wearily got ready for bed.

The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night-silence. Isaac felt strangely wakeful.

He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy, for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moaning of the wind in the wood.

Sleep stole on him before he was aware of it. His eyes closed, and he fell off insensibly to rest without having so much as thought of extinguishing the candle.

The first sensation of which he was conscious after sinking into slumber was a strange shivering that ran through him suddenly from head to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at the heart, such as he had never felt before. The shivering only disturbed his slumbers; the pain woke him instantly. In one moment he passed from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness – his eyes wide open – his mental perceptions cleared on a sudden, as if by a miracle.

The candle had burned down nearly to the last morsel of tallow, but the top of the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light in the little room was, for the moment, fair and full.

Between the foot of his bed and the closed door there stood a woman with a knife in her hand, looking at him.

He was stricken speechless with terror, but he did not lose the preternatural clearness of his faculties, and he never took his eyes off the woman. She said not a word as they stared each other in the face, but she began to move slowly toward the left-hand side of the bed.

His eyes followed her. She was a fair, fine woman, with yellowish flaxen hair and light grey eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. He noticed those things and fixed them on his mind before she was round at the side of the bed. Speechless, with no expression in her face, with no noise following her footfall, she came closer and closer – stopped – and slowly raised the knife. He laid his right arm over his throat to save it; but, as he saw the knife coming down, threw his hand across the bed to the right side, and jerked his body over that way just as the knife descended on the mattress within an inch of his shoulder.

His eyes fixed on her arm and hand as she slowly drew her knife out of the bed: a white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly over the fair skin – a delicate lady’s hand, with the crowning beauty of a pink flush under and round the fingernails.

She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the bed; stopped there for a moment looking at him; then came on – still speechless, still with no expression on the blank, beautiful face, still with no sound following the stealthy footfalls – came on to the right side of the bed, where he now lay.

As she approached, she raised the knife again, and he drew himself away to the left side. She struck, as before, right into the mattress, with a deliberate, perpendicularly downward action of the arm. This time his eyes wandered from her to the knife. It was like the large clasp-knives which he had often seen labouring men use to cut their bread and bacon with. Her delicate little fingers did not conceal more than two-thirds of the handle: he noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and shining as the blade was, and looking like new.

For the second time she drew the knife out, concealed it in the wide sleeve of her gown, then stopped by the bedside, watching him. For an instant he saw her standing in that position, then the wick of the spent candle fell over into the socket; the flame diminished to a little blue point, and the room grew dark.

A moment, or less, if possible, passed so, and then the wick flamed up, smokily, for the last time. His eyes were still looking eagerly over the right-hand side of the bed when the final flash of light came, but they discovered nothing. The fair woman with the knife was gone.

The conviction that he was alone again weakened the hold of the terror that had struck him dumb up to this time. The preternatural sharpness which the very intensity of his panic had mysteriously imparted to his faculties left them suddenly. His brain grew confused – his heart beat wildly – his ears opened for the first time since the appearance of the woman to a sense of the woeful ceaseless moaning of the wind among the trees. With the dreadful conviction of the reality of what he had seen still strong within him, he leaped out of bed, and screaming “Murder! Wake up, there! wake up!” dashed headlong through the darkness to the door.

It was fast locked, exactly as he had left it on going to bed.

His cries on starting up had alarmed the house. He heard the terrified, confused exclamations of women; he saw the master of the house approaching along the passage with his burning rush-candle in one hand and his gun in the other.

“What is it?” asked the landlord, breathlessly. Isaac could only answer in a whisper. “A woman, with a knife in her hand,” he gasped out. “In my room – a fair, yellow-haired woman; she jobbed at me with the knife twice over.”

The landlord’s pale cheeks grew paler. He looked at Isaac eagerly by the flickering light of his candle, and his face began to get red again; his voice altered, too, as well as his complexion.

“She seems to have missed you twice,” he said.

“I dodged the knife as it came down,” Isaac went on, in the same scared whisper. “It struck the bed each time.”

The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately. In less than a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.

“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife! There isn’t a mark in the bedclothes anywhere. What do you mean by coming into a man’s place and frightening his family out of their wits about a dream?”

“I’ll leave your house,” said Isaac, faintly. “Better out on the road, in rain and dark, on my road home, than back again in that room, after what I’ve seen in it. Lend me a light to get my clothes by, and tell me what I’m to pay.”

“Pay!” cried the landlord, leading the way with his light sulkily into the bedroom. “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go downstairs. I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got about you if I’d known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand. Look at the bed. Where’s the cut of a knife in it? Look at the window – is the lock bursted? Look at the door (which I heard you fasten yourself) – is it broke in? A murdering woman with a knife in my house! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

Isaac answered not a word. He huddled on his clothes, and then they went downstairs together.

“Nigh on twenty minutes past two!” said the landlord, as they passed the clock. “A nice time in the morning to frighten honest people out of their wits!”

Isaac paid his bill, and the landlord let him out at the front door, asking, with a grin of contempt, as he undid the strong fastenings, whether “the murdering woman got in that way.”

They parted without a word on either side. The rain had ceased, but the night was dark, and the wind bleaker than ever. Little did the darkness, or the cold, or the uncertainty about the way home matter to Isaac. If he had been turned out into a wilderness in a thunder-storm it would have been a relief after what he had suffered in the bedroom of the inn.

What was the fair woman with the knife? The creature of a dream, or that other creature from the unknown world called among men by the name of ghost? He could make nothing of the mystery – had made nothing of it, even when it was midday on Wednesday, and when he stood, at last, after many times missing his road, once more on the doorstep of home.

•   •   •   •   •

•  III  •

His mother came out eagerly to receive him.

His face told her in a moment that something was wrong.

“I’ve lost the place; but that’s my luck. I dreamed an ill dream last night, mother – or maybe I saw a ghost. Take it either way, it scared me out of my senses, and I’m not my own man again yet.”

“Isaac, your face frightens me. Come in to the fire – come in, and tell mother all about it.”

He was as anxious to tell as she was to hear; for it had been his hope, all the way home, that his mother, with her quicker capacity and superior knowledge, might be able to throw some light on the mystery which he could not clear up for himself. His memory of the dream was still mechanically vivid, though his thoughts were entirely confused by it.

His mother’s face grew paler and paler as he went on. She never interrupted him by so much as a single word; but when he had done, she moved her chair close to his, put her arm round his neck, and said to him:

“Isaac, you dreamed your ill dream on this Wednesday morning. What time was it when you saw the fair woman with the knife in her hand?” Isaac reflected on what the landlord had said when they had passed by the clock on his leaving the inn; allowed as nearly as he could for the time that must have elapsed between the unlocking of his bedroom door and the paying of his bill just before going away, and answered:

“Somewhere about two o’clock in the morning.”

His mother suddenly quitted her hold of his neck, and struck her hands together with a gesture of despair.

“This Wednesday is your birthday, Isaac, and two o’clock in the morning was the time when you were born.”

Isaac’s capacities were not quick enough to catch the infection of his mother’s superstitious dread. He was amazed, and a little startled, also, when she suddenly rose from her chair, opened her old writing-desk, took pen, ink and paper, and then said to him:

“Your memory is but a poor one, Isaac, and, now I’m an old woman, mine’s not much better. I want all about this dream of yours to be as well known to both of us, years hence, as it is now. Tell me over again all you told me a minute ago, when you spoke of what the woman with the knife looked like.”

Isaac obeyed, and marvelled much as he saw his mother carefully set down on paper the very words that he was saying.

“Light grey eyes,” she wrote, as they came to the descriptive part, “with a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them; little lady’s hand, with a reddish look about the finger nails; clasp-knife with a buck-horn handle, that seemed as good as new.” To these particulars Mrs. Scatchard added the year, month, day of the week, and time in the morning when the woman of the dream appeared to her son. She then locked up the paper carefully in her writing-desk.

Neither on that day nor on any day after could her son induce her to return to the matter of the dream. She obstinately kept her thoughts about it to herself, and even refused to refer again to the paper in her writing-desk. Ere long Isaac grew weary of attempting to make her break her resolute silence; and time, which sooner or later wears out all things, gradually wore out the impression produced on him by the dream. He began by thinking of it carelessly, and he ended by not thinking of it at all.

The result was the more easily brought about by the advent of some important changes for the better in his prospects which commenced not long after his terrible night’s experience at the inn. He reaped at last the reward of his long and patient suffering under adversity by getting an excellent place, keeping it for seven years, and leaving it, on the death of his master, not only with an excellent character, but also with a comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for saving his mistress’s life in a carriage accident. Thus it happened that Isaac Scatchard returned to his old mother, seven years after the time of the dream at the inn, with an annual sum of money at his disposal sufficient to keep them both in ease and independence for the rest of their lives.

The mother, whose health had been bad of late years, profited so much by the care bestowed on her and by freedom from money anxieties, that when Isaac’s birthday came round she was able to sit up comfortably at table and dine with him.

On that day, as the evening drew on, Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a bottle of tonic medicine which she was accustomed to take, and in which she had fancied that a dose or more was still left, happened to be empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist’s and get it filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the roadside inn.

On going into the chemist’s shop he was passed hurriedly by a poorly-dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the doorsteps.

“You’re noticing that woman?” said the chemist’s apprentice behind the counter. “It’s my opinion there’s something wrong with her. She’s been asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master’s out for half an hour, and I told her I wasn’t allowed to sell poison to strangers in his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she’ll be disappointed. It’s a case of suicide, sir, if ever there was one yet.”

These words added immeasurably to the sudden interest in the woman which Isaac had felt at the first sight of her face. After he had got the medicine-bottle filled, he looked about anxiously for her as soon as he was out in the street. She was walking slowly up and down on the opposite side of the road. With his heart, very much to his own surprise, beating fast, Isaac crossed over and spoke to her.

He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet; then moved under a lamp so as to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face.

“I look like a comfortable, happy woman, don’t I?” she said, with a bitter laugh.

She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies’ lips. Her slightest actions seemed to have the easy, negligent grace of a thoroughbred woman. Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Little by little, in answer to his questions, the sad story of the woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.

“My name is Rebecca Murdoch,” said the woman, as she ended. “I have nine-pence left, and I thought of spending it at the chemist’s over the way in securing a passage to the other world. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse to me than this, so why should I stop here?”

Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all the time the woman was speaking which utterly confused his ideas and almost deprived him of his powers of speech. All that he could say in answer to her last reckless words was that he would prevent her from attempting her own life, if he followed her about all night to do it. His rough, trembling earnestness seemed to impress her.

“I won’t occasion you that trouble,” she answered, when he repeated his threat. “You have given me a fancy for living by speaking kindly to me. No need for the mockery of protestations and promises. You may believe me without them. Come to Fuller’s Meadow tomorrow at twelve, and you will find me alive, to answer for myself – No! – no money. My ninepence will do to get me as good a night’s lodging as I want.”

She nodded and left him. He made no attempt to follow – he felt no suspicion that she was deceiving him.

“It’s strange, but I can’t help believing her,” he said to himself, and walked away, bewildered, toward home.

On entering the house, his mind was still so completely absorbed by its new subject of interest that he took no notice of what his mother was doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine. She had opened her old writing-desk in his absence, and was now reading a paper attentively that lay inside it. On every birthday of Isaac’s since she had written down the particulars of his dream from his own lips, she had been accustomed to read that same paper, and ponder over it in private.

The next day he went to Fuller’s Meadow.

He had done only right in believing her so implicitly. She was there, punctual to a minute, to answer for herself. The last-left faint defences in Isaac’s heart against the fascination which a word or look from her began inscrutably to exercise over him sank down and vanished before her forever on that memorable morning.

When a man, previously insensible to the influence of women, forms an attachment in middle life, the instances are rare indeed, let the warning circumstances be what they may, in which he is found capable of freeing himself from the tyranny of the new ruling passion. The charm of being spoken to familiarly, fondly, and gratefully by a woman whose language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement to hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac’s rank at the age of twenty. But it was far more than that – it was certain ruin to him – now that his heart was opening unworthily to a new influence at that middle time of life when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most stubbornly in a man’s moral nature. A few more stolen interviews after that first morning in Fuller’s Meadow completed his infatuation. In less than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard had consented to give Rebecca Murdoch a new interest in existence, and a chance of recovering the character she had lost by promising to make her his wife.

She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties as well. All the mind he had he put into her keeping. She directed him on every point – even instructing him how to break the news of his approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.

“If you tell her how you met me and who I am at first,” said the cunning woman, “she will move heaven and earth to prevent our marriage. Say I am the sister of one of your fellow-servants – ask her to see me before you go into any more particulars – and leave it to me to do the rest. I mean to make her love me next best to you, Isaac, before she knows anything of who I really am.” The motive of the deceit was sufficient to sanctify it to Isaac. The stratagem proposed relieved him of his one great anxiety, and quieted his uneasy conscience on the subject of his mother. Still, there was something wanting to perfect his happiness, something that he could not realize, something mysteriously untraceable, and yet something that perpetually made itself felt; not when he was absent from Rebecca Murdoch, but, strange to say, when he was actually in her presence! She was kindness itself with him. She never made him feel his inferior capacities and inferior manners. She showed the sweetest anxiety to please him in the smallest trifles; but, in spite of all these attractions, he never could feel quite at his ease with her. At their first meeting, there had mingled with his admiration, when he looked in her face, a faint, involuntary feeling of doubt whether that face was entirely strange to him. No after familiarity had the slightest effect on this inexplicable, wearisome uncertainty.

Concealing the truth as he had been directed, he announced his marriage engagement precipitately and confusedly to his mother on the day when he contracted it. Poor Mrs. Scatchard showed her perfect confidence in her son by flinging her arms round his neck, and giving him joy of having found at last, in the sister of one of his fellow-servants, a woman to comfort and care for him after his mother was gone. She was all eagerness to see the woman of her son’s choice, and the next day was fixed for the introduction.

It was a bright sunny morning, and the little cottage parlour was full of light as Mrs. Scatchard, happy and expectant, dressed for the occasion in her Sunday gown, sat waiting for her son and her future daughter-in-law.

Punctual to the appointed time, Isaac hurriedly and nervously led his promised wife into the room. His mother rose to receive her – advanced a few steps, smiling – looked Rebecca full in the eyes, and suddenly stopped. Her face, which had been flushed the moment before, turned white in an instant; her eyes lost their expression of softness and kindness, and assumed a blank look of terror; her outstretched hands fell to her sides, and she staggered back a few steps with a low cry to her son.

“Isaac,” she whispered, clutching him fast by the arm when he asked alarmedly if she was taken ill, “Isaac, does that woman’s face remind you of nothing?”

Before he could answer – before he could look round to where Rebecca stood, astonished and angered by her reception, at the lower end of the room, his mother pointed impatiently to her writing-desk, and gave him the key.

“Open it,” she said, in a quick breathless whisper.

“What does this mean? Why am I treated as if I had no business here? Does your mother want to insult me?” asked Rebecca, angrily.

“Open it, and give me the paper in the left-hand drawer. Quick! quick, for Heaven’s sake!” said Mrs. Scatchard, shrinking further back in terror.

Isaac gave her the paper. She looked it over eagerly for a moment, then followed Rebecca, who was now turning away haughtily to leave the room, and caught her by the shoulder – abruptly raised the long, loose sleeve of her gown, and glanced at her hand and arm. Something like fear began to steal over the angry expression of Rebecca’s face as she shook herself free from the old woman’s grasp. “Mad!” she said to herself; “and Isaac never told me.” With these few words she left the room.

Isaac was hastening after her when his mother turned and stopped his further progress. It wrung his heart to see the misery and terror in her face as she looked at him.

“Light grey eyes,” she said, in low, mournful, awestruck tones, pointing toward the open door; “a droop in the left eyelid; flaxen hair, with a gold-yellow streak in it; white arms, with a down upon them; little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the finger nails – The Dream-Woman, Isaac, the Dream-Woman!”

That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in Rebecca Murdoch’s presence was fatally set at rest forever. He had seen her face, then, before – seven years before, on his birthday, in the bedroom of the lonely inn.

“Be warned! oh, my son, be warned! Isaac, Isaac, let her go, and do you stop with me!”

Something darkened the parlour window as those words were said. A sudden chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca Murdoch had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low window-blind.

“I have promised to marry, mother,” he said, “and marry I must.”

The tears came into his eyes as he spoke and dimmed his sight, but he could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the window.

His mother’s head sank lower.

“Are you faint?” he whispered.

“Broken-hearted, Isaac.”

He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to the window, and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.

•   •   •   •   •

•  IV  •

Three weeks after that day, Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man’s moral nature seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailably in his heart.

After that first interview in the cottage parlour no consideration would induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son’s wife again or even to talk of her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage.

This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of that between mother and son. There was no question of anything but the fearfully-exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the spectre-woman of Isaac’s dream.

Rebecca on her side neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the sake of peace, had never contradicted her first idea that age and long illness had affected Mrs. Scatchard’s mind. He even allowed his wife to upbraid him for not having confessed this to her at the time of their marriage engagement, rather than risk anything by hinting at the truth. The sacrifice of his integrity before his one all-mastering delusion seemed but a small thing, and cost his conscience but little after the sacrifices he had already made.

The time of waking from this delusion – the cruel and the rueful time – was not far off. After some quiet months of married life, as the summer was ending, and the year was getting on toward the month of his birthday, Isaac found his wife altering toward him. She grew sullen and contemptuous; she formed acquaintances of the most dangerous kind in defiance of his objections, his entreaties, and his commands; and, worst of all, she learned, ere long, after every fresh difference with her husband, to seek the deadly self-oblivion of drink. Little by little, after the first miserable discovery that his wife was keeping company with drunkards, the shocking certainty forced itself on Isaac that she had grown to be a drunkard herself.

He had been in a sadly desponding state for some time before the occurrence of these domestic calamities. His mother’s health, as he could but too plainly discern every time he went to see her at the cottage, was failing fast, and he upbraided himself in secret as the cause of the bodily and mental suffering she endured. When to his remorse on his mother’s account was added the shame and misery occasioned by the discovery of his wife’s degradation, he sank under the double trial – his face began to alter fast, and he looked what he was, a spirit-broken man.

His mother, still struggling bravely against the illness that was hurrying her to the grave, was the first to notice the sad alteration in him, and the first to hear of his last worst trouble with his wife. She could only weep bitterly on the day when he made his humiliating confession, but on the next occasion when he went to see her she had taken a resolution in reference to his domestic afflictions which astonished and even alarmed him. He found her dressed to go out, and on asking the reason received this answer:

“I am not long for this world, Isaac,” she said, “and I shall not feel easy on my deathbed unless I have done my best to the last to make my son happy. I mean to put my own fears and my own feelings out of the question, and to go with you to your wife, and try what I can do to reclaim her. Give me your arm, Isaac, and let me do the last thing I can in this world to help my son before it is too late.”

He could not disobey her, and they walked together slowly toward his miserable home.

It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when they reached the cottage where he lived. It was their dinner-hour, and Rebecca was in the kitchen. He was thus able to take his mother quietly into the parlour, and then prepare his wife for the interview. She had fortunately drunk but little at that early hour, and she was less sullen and capricious than usual.

He returned to his mother with his mind tolerably at ease. His wife soon followed him into the parlour, and the meeting between her and Mrs. Scatchard passed off better than he had ventured to anticipate, though he observed with secret apprehension that his mother, resolutely as she controlled herself in other respects, could not look his wife in the face when she spoke to her. It was a relief to him, therefore, when Rebecca began to lay the cloth.

She laid the cloth, brought in the bread-tray, and cut a slice from the loaf for her husband, then returned to the kitchen. At that moment, Isaac, still anxiously watching his mother, was startled by seeing the same ghastly change pass over her face which had altered it so awfully on the morning when Rebecca and she first met. Before he could say a word, she whispered, with a look of horror:

“Take me back – home, home again, Isaac. Come with me, and never go back again.”

He was afraid to ask for an explanation; he could only sign to her to be silent, and help her quickly to the door. As they passed the bread-tray on the table she stopped and pointed to it.

“Did you see what your wife cut your bread with?” she asked, in a low whisper.

“No, mother – I was not noticing – what was it?”

“Look!”

He did look. A new clasp-knife with a buckhorn handle lay with the loaf in the bread-tray. He stretched out his hand shudderingly to possess himself of it; but, at the same time, there was a noise in the kitchen, and his mother caught at his arm.

“The knife of the dream! Isaac, I’m faint with fear. Take me away before she comes back.”

He was hardly able to support her. The visible, tangible reality of the knife struck him with a panic, and utterly destroyed any faint doubts that he might have entertained up to this time in relation to the mysterious dream-warning of nearly eight years before. By a last desperate effort, he summoned self-possession enough to help his mother out of the house – so quietly that the “Dream-woman” (he thought of her by that name now) did not hear them departing from the kitchen.

“Don’t go back, Isaac – don’t go back!” implored Mrs. Scatchard, as he turned to go away, after seeing her safely seated again in her own room.

“I must get the knife,” he answered, under his breath. His mother tried to stop him again, but he hurried out without another word.

On his return he found that his wife had discovered their secret departure from the house. She had been drinking, and was in a fury of passion. The dinner in the kitchen was flung under the grate; the cloth was off the parlour table. Where was the knife?

Unwisely, he asked for it. She was only too glad of the opportunity of irritating him which the request afforded her. “He wanted the knife, did he? Could he give her a reason why? No! Then he should not have it – not if he went down on his knees to ask for it.” Further recriminations elicited the fact that she had bought it a bargain, and that she considered it her own especial property. Isaac saw the uselessness of attempting to get the knife by fair means, and determined to search for it, later in the day, in secret. The search was unsuccessful. Night came on, and he left the house to walk about the streets. He was afraid now to sleep in the same room with her.

Three weeks passed. Still sullenly enraged with him, she would not give up the knife; and still that fear of sleeping in the same room with her possessed him. He walked about at night, or dozed in the parlour, or sat watching by his mother’s bedside. Before the expiration of the first week in the new month his mother died. It wanted then but ten days of her son’s birthday. She had longed to live till that anniversary. Isaac was present at her death, and her last words in this world were addressed to him:

“Don’t go back, my son, don’t go back!” He was obliged to go back, if it were only to watch his wife. Exasperated to the last degree by his distrust of her, she had revengefully sought to add a sting to his grief, during the last days of his mother’s illness, by declaring that she would assert her right to attend the funeral. In spite of anything he could do or say, she held with wicked pertinacity to her word, and on the day appointed for the burial forced herself – inflamed and shameless with drink – into her husband’s presence, and declared that she would walk in the funeral procession to his mother’s grave.

This last worst outrage, accompanied by all that was most insulting in word and look, maddened him for the moment. He struck her.

The instant the blow was dealt he repented it. She crouched down, silent, in a corner of the room, and eyed him steadily; it was a look that cooled his hot blood and made him tremble. But there was no time now to think of a means of making atonement. Nothing remained but to risk the worst till the funeral was over. There was but one way of making sure of her. He locked her into her bedroom.

When he came back some hours after, he found her sitting, very much altered in look and bearing, by the bedside, with a bundle on her lap. She rose, and faced him quietly, and spoke with a strange stillness in her voice, a strange repose in her eyes, a strange composure in her manner.

“No man has ever struck me twice,” she said, “and my husband shall have no second opportunity. Set the door open and let me go. From this day forth we see each other no more.”

Before he could answer she passed him and left the room. He saw her walk away up the street.

Would she return?

All that night he watched and waited, but no footstep came near the house. The next night, overpowered by fatigue, he lay down in bed in his clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning. His slumber was not disturbed. The third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth passed, and nothing happened.

He lay down on the seventh, still in his clothes, still with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning, but easier in his mind.

Easier in his mind, and in perfect health of body when he fell off to sleep. But his rest was disturbed. He woke twice without any sensation of uneasiness. But the third time it was that never-to-be-forgotten shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that dreadful sinking pain at the heart, which once more aroused him in an instant.

His eyes opened toward the left-hand side of the bed, and there stood – The Dream-Woman again? No! His wife; the living reality, with the dream-spectre’s face, in the dream-spectre’s attitude; the fair arm up, the knife clasped in the delicate white hand.

He sprang upon her almost at the instant of seeing her, and yet not quickly enough to prevent her from hiding the knife. Without a word from him – without a cry from her – he pinioned her in a chair. With one hand he felt up her sleeve, and there, where the Dream-Woman had hidden the knife, his wife had hidden it – the knife with the buckhorn handle, that looked like new.

In the despair of that fearful moment his brain was steady, his heart was calm. He looked at her fixedly with the knife in his hand, and said these last words:

“You told me we should see each other no more, and you have come back. It is my turn now to go, and to go forever. I say that we shall see each other no more, and my word shall not be broken.”

He left her, and set forth into the night. There was a bleak wind abroad, and the smell of recent rain was in the air. The distant church-clocks chimed the quarter as he walked rapidly beyond the last houses in the suburb. He asked the first policeman he met what hour that was of which the quarter past had just struck.

The man referred sleepily to his watch, and answered, “Two o’clock.” Two in the morning. What day of the month was this day that had just begun? He reckoned it up from the date of his mother’s funeral. The fatal parallel was complete: it was his birthday!

Had he escaped the mortal peril which his dream foretold? or had he only received a second warning?

As that ominous doubt forced itself on his mind, he stopped, reflected, and turned back again toward the city. He was still resolute to hold to his word, and never to let her see him more; but there was a thought now in his mind of having her watched and followed. The knife was in his possession; the world was before him; but a new distrust of her – a vague, unspeakable, superstitious dread had overcome him.

“I must know where she goes, now she thinks I have left her,” he said to himself, as he stole back wearily to the precincts of his house.

It was still dark. He had left the candle burning in the bedchamber; but when he looked up to the window of the room now there was no light in it. He crept cautiously to the house door. On going away, he remembered to have closed it; on trying it now, he found it open.

He waited outside, never losing sight of the house, till daylight. Then he ventured indoors – listened, and heard nothing – looked into kitchen, scullery, parlour and found nothing; went up at last into the bedroom – it was empty. A pick-lock lay on the floor betraying how she had gained entrance in the night, and that was the only trace of her.

Whither had she gone? That no mortal tongue could tell him. The darkness had covered her flight; and when the day broke, no man could say where the light found her.

Before leaving the house and the town forever, he gave instructions to a friend and neighbour to sell his furniture for anything that it would fetch, and apply the proceeds to employing the police to trace her. The directions were honestly followed, and the money was all spent, but the inquiries led to nothing. The pick-lock on the bedroom floor remained the one last useless trace of the Dream-Woman.

At this point of the narrative the landlord paused, and, turning toward the window of the room in which we were sitting, looked in the direction of the stable-yard.

“So far,” he said, “I tell you what was told to me. The little that remains to be added lies within my own experience. Between two and three months after the events I have just been relating, Isaac Scatchard came to me, withered and old-looking before his time, just as you saw him today. He had his testimonials to character with him, and he asked for employment here. Knowing that my wife and he were distantly related, I gave him a trial in consideration of that relationship, and liked him in spite of his queer habits. He is as sober, honest, and willing a man as there is in England. As for his restlessness at night, and his sleeping away his leisure time in the day, who can wonder at it after hearing his story? Besides, he never objects to being roused up when he’s wanted, so there’s not much inconvenience to complain of, after all.”

“I suppose he is afraid of a return of that dreadful dream, and of waking out of it in the dark?” said I.

“No,” returned the landlord. “The dream comes back to him so often that he has got to bear with it by this time resignedly enough. It’s his wife keeps him waking at night as he has often told me.”

“What! Has she never been heard of yet?”

“Never. Isaac himself has the one perpetual thought about her, that she is alive and looking for him. I believe he wouldn’t let himself drop off to sleep toward two in the morning for a king’s ransom. Two in the morning, he says, is the time she will find him, one of these days. Two in the morning is the time all the year round when he likes to be most certain that he has got that clasp-knife safe about him. He does not mind being alone as long as he is awake, except on the night before his birthday, when he firmly believes himself to be in peril of his life. The birthday has only come round once since he has been here, and then he sat up along with the night-porter. ‘She’s looking for me,’ is all he says when anybody speaks to him about the one anxiety of his life; ‘she’s looking for me.’ He may be right. She may be looking for him. Who can tell?”

“Who can tell?” said I.

•  THE END  •

THE HOLLY-TREE INN

CONTENTS:

- The Guest
Charles Dickens

- The Ostler
Wilkie Collins

- The Boots
Charles Dickens

- The Landlord
William Howit

- The Bar-Maid
Adelaide Procter

- The Poor Pensioner
Holme Lee (Harriet Parr)

- The Bill
Charles Dickens

THE GUEST

I have kept one secret in the course of my life. I am a bashful man. Nobody would suppose it, nobody ever does suppose it, nobody ever did suppose it. But, I am naturally a bashful man. This is the secret which I have never breathed until now.

I might greatly move the reader, by some account of the innumerable places I have not been to, the innumerable people I have not called upon or received, the innumerable social evasions I have been guilty of, solely because I am by original constitution and character, a bashful man. But, I will leave the reader unmoved, and proceed with the object before me.

That object is, to give a plain account of my travels and discoveries in the Holly-Tree Inn; in which place of good entertainment for man and beast, I was once snowed up.

It happened in the memorable year when I parted forever from Angela Leath, whom I was shortly to have married, on making the discovery that she preferred my bosom friend. From our school days I had freely admitted Edwin, in my own mind, to be far superior to myself, and, though I was grievously wounded at heart, I felt the preference to be natural, and tried to forgive them both. It was under these circumstances that I resolved to go to America – on my way to the Devil.

Communicating my discovery neither to Angela nor to Edwin, but resolving to write each of them an affecting letter conveying my blessing and forgiveness, which the steam tender for shore should carry to the post when I myself should be bound for the New World, far beyond recall; – I say, locking up my grief in my own breast, and consoling myself as I could, with the prospect of being generous, I quietly left all I held dear, and started on the desolate journey I have mentioned.

The dead winter time was in full dreariness when I left my chambers forever, at five o’clock in the morning. I had shaved by candlelight, of course, and was miserably cold, and experienced that general all-pervading sensation of getting up to be hanged, which I have usually found inseparable from untimely rising under such circumstances.

How well I remember the forlorn aspect of Fleet Street when I came out of the Temple! The street-lamps flickering in the gusty northeast wind as if the very gas were contorted with cold; the white-topped houses; the bleak, starlighted sky; the market people and other early stragglers, trotting to circulate their almost frozen blood; the hospitable light and warmth of the few coffee-shops and public-houses that were open for such customers; the hard, dry, frosty rime with which the air was charged (the wind had already beaten it into every crevice), and which lashed my face like a steel whip.

It wanted nine days to the end of the month, and end of the year. The post-office packet for the United States was to depart from Liverpool, weather permitting, on the first of the ensuing month, and I had the intervening time on my hands. I had taken this into consideration, and had resolved to make a visit to a certain spot (which I need not name), on the further borders of Yorkshire.

It was endeared to me by my having first seen Angela at a farm-house in that place, and my melancholy was gratified by the idea of taking a wintry leave of it before my expatriation. I ought to explain, that to avoid being sought out before my resolution should have been rendered irrevocable by being carried into full effect, I had written to Angela overnight, in my usual manner, lamenting that urgent business – of which she should know all particulars by and by – took me unexpectedly away from her for a week or ten days.

There was no Northern Railway at that time, and in its place there were stagecoaches: which I occasionally find myself, in common with some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box-seat on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was, to get into a cab with my portmanteau, so as to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach. But, when one of our Temple watchmen who carried my portmanteau into Fleet Street for me, told me about the huge blocks of ice that had for some days past been floating in the river, having closed up in the night and made a walk from the Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I began to ask myself the question. Whether the box-seat would not be likely to put a sudden and a frosty end to my unhappiness? I was heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen to death.

When I got up to the Peacock – where I found everybody drinking hot purl, in self-preservation – I asked, if there were an inside seat to spare? I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded particularly well. However, I took a little purl (which I found uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was seated, they built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey.

It was still dark when we left the Peacock. For a little while, pale uncertain ghosts of houses and trees appeared and vanished, and then it was hard, black, frozen day. People were lighting their fires; smoke was mounting straight up, high into the rarified air; and we were rattling for Highgate Archway over the hardest ground I have ever heard the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into the country, everything seemed to have grown old and grey. The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in farmers’ yards. Outdoor work was abandoned, horse-troughs at roadside inns were frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors were close shut, little turnpike houses had blazing fires inside, and children (even turnpike people have children, and seem to like them) rubbed the frost from the little panes of glass with their chubby arms, that their bright eyes might catch a glimpse of the solitary coach going by. I don’t know when the snow began to set in; but, I know that we were changing horses somewhere, when I heard the guard remark, “That the old lady up in the sky was picking her geese pretty hard today.” Then, indeed, I found the white down falling fast and thick.

The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out as a lonely traveller does. I was warm and valiant after eating and drinking – particularly after dinner; cold and depressed at all other times. I was always bewildered as to time and place, and always more or less out of my senses. The coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus, Auld Lang Syne, without a moment’s intermission. They kept the time and tune with the greatest regularity, and rose into the swell at the beginning of the Refrain, with a precision that worried me to death. While we changed horses, the guard and coachman went stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes in the snow, and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves without being any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it darkened again, with two great white casks, standing on end. Our horses tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up – which was the pleasantest variety I had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night long we went on in this manner. Thus, we came round the clock, upon the Great North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day again. And it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

I forget now, where we were at noon on the second day, and where we ought to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles behindhand, and that our case was growing worse every hour. The drift was becoming prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed out; the road and the fields were all one; instead of having fences and hedgerows to guide us, we went crunching on, over an unbroken surface of ghastly white that might sink beneath us at any moment and drop us down a whole hillside. Still, the coachman and guard – who kept together on the box, always in council, and looking well about them – made out the track with astonishing sagacity.

•   •   •

When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a large drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on the churches and houses where the snow lay thickest. When we came within a town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial faces choked with snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole place were overgrown with white moss. As to the coach, it was a mere snowball; similarly, the men and boys who ran along beside us to the town’s end, turning our clogged wheels and encouraging our horses, were men and boys of snow; and the bleak wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us, was a snowy Sahara. One would have thought this enough; notwithstanding which, I pledge my word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole day; seeing nothing out of towns and villages, but the tract of stoats, hares and foxes, and sometimes of birds. At nine o’clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor, a cheerful burst from our horn, and a welcome sound of talking, with a glimmering and moving about of lanterns, roused me from my drowsy state. I found that we were going to change. They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became as white as King Lear’s in a single minute:

“What inn is this?”

“The Holly-Tree, sir,” said he.

“Upon my word, I believe,” said I apologetically to the guard and coachman, “that I must stop here.”

Now, the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the post-boy, and all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman, to the wide-eyed interest of all the rest of the establishment, if he meant to go on? The coachman had already replied, “Yes, he’d talk her through it” – meaning by Her, the coach – “if so be as George would stand by him.” George was the guard, and he had ready sworn that he would stand by him. So, the helpers were already getting the horses out.

My declaring myself beaten, after this parley, was not an announcement without preparation. Indeed, but for the way to the announcement being smoothed by the parley, I more than doubt whether, as an innately bashful man, I should have had the confidence to make it. As it was, it received the approval, even of the guard and coachman. – Therefore, with many confirmations of my inclining, and many remarks from one bystander to another, that the gentleman could go for’ard by the mail tomorrow, whereas tonight he would only be froze, and where was the good of a gentleman being froze – ah, let alone buried alive (which latter clause was added by a humorous helper as a joke at my expense, and was extremely well received), I saw my portmanteau got out stiff, like a frozen body; did the handsome thing by the guard and coachman; wished them good-night and a prosperous journey; and, a little ashamed of myself after all, for leaving them to fight it out alone, followed the landlord, landlady, and waiter of the Holly-Tree, upstairs.

I thought I had never seen such a large room as that into which they showed me. It had five windows, with dark red curtains that would have absorbed the light of a general illumination; and there were complications of drapery at the top of the curtains, that went wandering about the wall in a most extraordinary manner. I asked for a smaller room, and they told me there was no smaller room. They could screen me in, however, the landlord said. They brought a great old japanned screen, with natives (Japanese, I suppose) engaged in a variety of idiotic pursuits all over it; and left me, roasting whole before an immense fire.

My bedroom was some quarter of a mile off, up a great staircase, at the end of a long gallery; and nobody knows what a misery this is to a bashful man who would rather not meet people on the stairs. It was the grimmest room I have ever had the nightmare in; and all the furniture, from the four posts of the bed to the two old silver candlesticks, was tall, high-shouldered, and spindle-waisted. Below, in my sitting-room, if I looked round my screen, the wind rushed at me like a mad bull; if I stuck to my armchair, the fire scorched me to the colour of a new brick. The chimney-piece was very high, and there was a bad glass – what I may call a wavy glass – above it, which, when I stood up, just showed me my anterior phrenological developments – and these never look well, in any subject, cut short off at the eyebrow. If I stood with my back to the fire, a gloomy vault of darkness above and beyond the screen insisted on being looked at; and, in its dim remoteness, the drapery of the ten curtains of the five windows went twisting and creeping about, like a nest of gigantic worms.

I suppose that what I observe in myself must be observed by some other men of similar character in themselves; therefore I am emboldened to mention, that when I travel, I never arrive at a place but I immediately want to go away from it. Before I had finished my supper of broiled fowl and mulled port, I had impressed upon the waiter in detail, my arrangements for departure in the morning. Breakfast and bill at eight. Fly at nine. Two horses, or, if needful, even four.

Tired though I was, the night appeared about a week long. In cases of nightmare, I thought of Angela, and felt more depressed than ever by the reflection that I was on the shortest road to Gretna Green! What had I to do with Gretna Green? I was not going that way to the Devil, but by the American route, I remarked, in my bitterness.

In the morning I found that it was snowing still, that it had snowed all night, and that I was snowed up. Nothing could get out of that spot on the moor, or could come at it, until the road had been cut out by labourers from the market-town. When they might cut their way to the Holly-Tree, nobody could tell me.

It was now Christmas Eve. I should have had a dismal Christmas-time of it anywhere, and, consequently, that did not so much matter; still, being snowed up was, like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained for. I felt very lonely. Yet I could no more have proposed to the landlord and landlady to admit me to their society (though I should have liked it very much) than I could have asked them to present me with a piece of plate. Here my great secret, the real bashfulness of my character, is to be observed. Like most bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were bashful too. Besides being far too shame-faced to make the proposal myself, I really had a delicate misgiving that it would be in the last degree disconcerting to them.

Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all asked what books there were in the house? The waiter brought me a Book of Roads, two or three old newspapers, a little songbook terminating in a collection of toasts and sentiments, a little jest-book, an odd volume of Peregrine Pickle, and the Sentimental Journey. I knew every word of the two last already, but I read them through again; then tried to hum all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was among them); went entirely through the jokes – in which I found a fund of melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered the papers. The latter had nothing in them but stock advertisements, a meeting about a county rate, and a highway robbery. As I am a greedy reader, I could not make this supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by tea-time. Being then entirely cast upon my own resources, I got through an hour in considering what to do next. Ultimately, it came into my head (from which I was anxious by any means to exclude Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my experience of inns, and would try how long it lasted me. I stirred the fire, moved my chair a little to one side of the screen – not daring to go far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me – I could hear it growling – and began.

My first impressions of an inn, dated from the nursery; consequently, I went back to the nursery for a starting point, and found myself at the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose specialty was a dismal narrative of a landlord by a roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies. For the better devotion of himself to this branch of industry, he had constructed a secret door behind the head of the bed; and when the visitor (oppressed with pie) had fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a lamp in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and would make him into pies; for which purpose he had coppers underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and rolled out his pastry in the dead of night. Yet even he was not insensible to the stings of conscience, for he never went to sleep without being heard to mutter, “Too much pepper!” – which was eventually the cause of his being brought to justice. I had no sooner disposed of this criminal than there started up another, of the same period, whose profession was, originally, house-breaking; in the pursuit of which art he had had his right ear chopped off one night as he was burglariously getting in at a window, by a brave and lovely servant-maid (whom the aquiline-nosed woman, though not at all answering the description, always mysteriously implied to be herself.) After several years, this brave and lovely servant-maid was married to the landlord of a country inn: which landlord had this remarkable characteristic, that he always wore a silk nightcap, and never would, on any consideration, take it off. At last, one night, when he was fast asleep, the brave and lovely woman lifted up his silk nightcap on the right side, and found that be had no ear there; upon which, she sagaciously perceived that he was the clipped house-breaker, who had married her with the intention of putting her to death. She immediately heated the poker and terminated his career, for which, she was taken to King George upon his throne, and received the compliments of royalty on her great discretion and valour. This same narrator, who had a ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes or the Bleeding Nun. She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was immensely rich – which my father was not; and immensely tall – which my father was not.

It was always a point with this ghoule to present my dearest relations and friends to my youthful mind, under circumstances of disparaging contrast. The brother-in-law was riding once, through a forest, on a magnificent horse (we had no magnificent horse at our house) attended by a favourite Newfoundland dog (we had no dog), when he found himself benighted, and came to an inn. A dark woman opened the door, and he asked her if he could have a bed there? She answered yes, and put his horse in the stable, and took him into a room where there were two dark men. While he was at supper, a parrot in the room began to talk, saying, “Blood, blood! Wipe up the blood!” Upon which one of the dark men wrung the parrot’s neck, and said he was fond of roasted parrots, and he meant to have this one for breakfast in the morning. After eating and drinking heartily, the immensely rich tall brother-in-law went to bed; but, he was rather vexed, because they had shut his dog in the stable, saying they never allowed dogs in the house. He sat very quiet for more than an hour, thinking and thinking, when, just as his candle was burning out, he heard a scratch at the door. He opened the door, and there was the Newfoundland dog! The dog came softly in, smelled about him, went straight to some straw in a corner which the dark men had said covered apples, tore the straw away, and disclosed two sheets steeped in blood. Just at that moment the candle went out, and the brother-in-law, looking through a chink in the door, saw the two dark men stealing upstairs; one armed with a dagger, that long (about five feet); the other carried a chopper, a sack, and a spade. Having no remembrance of the close of this adventure, I suppose my faculties to have been always so frozen with terror at this stage of it, that the power of listening stagnated within me for some quarter of an hour.

These barbarous stories carried me, sitting there on the Holly-Tree hearth, to the Roadside Inn, renowned in my time in a sixpenny book with a folding plate, representing in a central compartment of oval form the portrait of Jonathan Bradford, and in four corner compartments four incidents of tragedy with which the name is associated – coloured with a hand at once so free and economical, that the bloom of Jonathan’s complexion passed without any pause into the breeches of the ostler, and smearing itself off into the next division, became rum in a bottle. Then, I remembered how the landlord was found at the murdered traveller’s bedside, with his own knife at his feet, and blood upon his hand; how he was hanged for the murder, notwithstanding his protestation that he had indeed come there to kill the traveller for his saddle-bags, but had been stricken motionless on finding him already slain; and how the ostler, years afterwards, owned the deed. By this time I had made myself quite uncomfortable. I stirred the fire, and stood with my back to it, as long as I could bear the heat, looking up at the darkness beyond the screen, and at the wormy curtains creeping in and creeping out, like the worms in the ballad of Alonzo the Brave and the fair Imogene.

There was an inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these. I took it next. It was the inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign – the Mitre – and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord’s youngest daughter to distraction – but let that pass. It was in this inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.

“To be continued tomorrow,” said I, when I took my candle to go to bed. But, my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of thought that night. It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet, to a distant place (though still in England), and there, alighting from a stagecoach at another inn in the snow, as I had actually done some years before, I repeated in my sleep, a curious experience I had really had there. More than a year before I had made the journey in the course of which I put up at that inn, I had lost a very near and dear friend by death. Every night since, at home or away from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes, as still living; sometimes, as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me; always, as being beautiful, placid, and happy; never in association with any approach to fear or distress. It was at a lonely inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night. When I looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the moon was shining, I sat down by my fire, to write a letter. I had always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night of the dear lost one. But, in the letter that I wrote, I recorded the circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me, travel-tired, and in that remote place. No. I lost the beloved figure of my vision in parting with the secret. My sleep has never looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once. I was in Italy, and awoke (or seemed to awake), the well-remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it. I entreated it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me a question I had asked, touching the Future Life. My hands were still outstretched toward it as it vanished, when I heard a bell ringing by the garden wall, and a voice, in the deep stillness of the night, calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the dead; it being All Souls’ Eve.

To return to the Holly-Tree. When I awoke next day, it was freezing hard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow. My breakfast cleared away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat in the twilight, resumed my inn remembrances.

That was a good inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness. It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice window, came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid, I believe him to have been, and to be still) with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off: who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that anyone who counted them three times nine times, and then stood in the centre and said “I dare!” would behold a tremendous apparition, and be stricken dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard (I suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo) in manner following: He was out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace, what he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella, that had been blown from some conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean dwarf man upon a little pony. Having followed this object for some distance without gaining on it, and having called to it many times without receiving any answer, he pursued it for miles and miles, when, at length coming up with it, he discovered it to be the last bustard in Great Britain, degenerated into a wingless state, and running along the ground. Resolved to capture him or perish in the attempt, he closed with the bustard; but, the bustard, who had formed a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned him, and was last seen making off due west. This weird man at that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep walker, or an enthusiast, or a robber; but, I awoke one night to find him in the dark at my bedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific voice. I paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with all possible precipitation.

That was not a commonplace story which worked itself out at a little inn in Switzerland, while I was staying there. It was a very homely place, in a village of one narrow, zigzag street among mountains, and you went in at the main door through the cow-house, and among the mules and the dogs and the fowls, before ascending a great bare staircase to the rooms: which were all of unpainted wood, without plastering or papering – like rough packing-cases. Outside, there was nothing but the straggling street, a little toy church with a copper-coloured steeple, a pine forest, a torrent, mists, and mountain-sides.

A young man belonging to this inn, had disappeared eight weeks before (it was wintertime), and was supposed to have had some undiscovered love affair, and to have gone for a soldier. He had got up in the night, and dropped into the village street from the loft in which he slept with another man; and he had done it so quietly, that his companion and fellow-labourer had heard no movement when he was awakened in the morning, and they said “Louis, where is Henri?” They looked for him high and low, in vain, and gave him up. Now, outside this inn there stood, as there stood outside every dwelling in the village, a stack of fire-wood; but, the stack belonging to the inn was higher than any of the rest, because the inn was the richest house and burned the most fuel. It began to be noticed, while they were looking high and low, that a bantam cock, part of the livestock of the inn, put himself wonderfully out of his way to get to the top of this wood-stack; and that he would stay there for hours and hours, crowing, until he appeared in danger of splitting himself. Five weeks went on – six weeks – and still this terrible bantam, neglecting his domestic affairs, was always on the top of the wood-stack, crowing the very eyes out of his head. By this time it was perceived that Louis had become inspired with a violent animosity toward the terrible bantam, and one morning he was seen b}’ a woman who sat nursing her goitre at a little window in a gleam of sun, to catch up a rough billet of wood, with a great oath, hurl it at the terrible bantam crowing on the wood-stack, and bring him down dead. Hereupon, the woman, with a sudden light in her mind, stole round to the back of the wood-stack, and, being a good climber, as all those women are, climbed up, and soon was seen upon the summit, screaming, looking down upon the hollow within, and crying, “Seize Louis, the murderer! King the church bell! Here is the body!” I saw the murderer that day, and I saw him as I sat by my fire at the Holly-Tree Inn, and I see him now, lying shackled with cords on the stable litter, among the mild eyes and the smoking breath of the cows, waiting to be taken away by the police, and stared at by the fearful village. A heavy animal – the dullest animal in the stables – with a stupid head and a lumpish face devoid of any trace of sensibility, who had been, within the knowledge of the murdered youth, an embezzler of certain small moneys belonging to his master, and who had taken this hopeful mode of putting a possible accuser out of his way. All of which he confessed next day, like a sulky wretch who couldn’t be troubled any more, now that they had got hold of him and meant to make an end of him. I saw him once again, on the day of my departure from the inn. In that canton the headsman still does his office with a sword; and I came upon this murderer sitting bound to a chair, with his eyes bandaged, on a scaffold in a little marketplace. In that instant, a great sword (loaded with quicksilver in the thick part of the blade) swept round him like a gust of wind, or fire, and there was no such creature in the world. My wonder was – not that he was so suddenly dispatched, but that any head was left un-reaped, within a radius of fifty yards of that tremendous sickle.

That was a good inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady, and the honest landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of the apartments has a zoölogical papering on the walls, not so accurately joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices in a tiger’s hind legs and tail; while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks; and the bear, moulting as it were, appears as to portions of himself like a leopard. I made several American friends at that inn, who all called Mont Blanc, Mount Blank – except one good-humoured gentleman, of a very sociable nature, who became on such intimate terms with it that he spoke of it familiarly as “Blank;” observing at breakfast, “Blank looks pretty tall this morning;” or considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening, whether there weren’t some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would make out the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start – now!

Once, I passed a fortnight at an inn in the North of England, where I was haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie. It was a Yorkshire pie, like a fort – an abandoned fort with nothing in it: but the waiter had a fixed idea that it was a point of ceremony at every meal, to put the pie on the table. After some days, I tried to hint, in several delicate ways, that I considered the pie done with; as, for example, by emptying fag-ends of glasses of wine into it; putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as into a basket; putting wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always in vain, the pie being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as before. At last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim of a spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it, fully as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful orchestra. Human prevision could not have foreseen the result – but the waiter mended the pie. With some effectual species of cement, he adroitly fitted the triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning and fled.

The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I made an overland expedition beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth window. Here, I was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived at my winter quarters once more, I made up the fire, and took another inn.

It was in the remotest part of Cornwall. – A great annual miners’ feast was being held at the inn, when I and my travelling companions presented ourselves at night among the wild crowd that were dancing before it by torchlight. We had had a breakdown in the dark, on a stony morass some miles away; and I had the honour of leading one of the unharnessed post-horses. If any lady or gentleman on perusal of the present lines, will take any very tall post-horse with his traces hanging about his legs, and will conduct him by his bearing-rein into the heart of a country dance of a hundred and fifty couples, that lady or gentleman will then, and only then, form an adequate idea of the extent to which that post-horse will tread on his conductor’s toes. Over and above which, the post-horse, finding three hundred people whirling about him, will probably rear, and also lash out with his hind legs, in a manner incompatible with dignity or self-respect on his conductor’s part. With such little drawbacks on my usually impressive aspect, I appeared at this Cornish inn, to the unutterable wonder of the Cornish miners. It was full, and twenty times full, and nobody could be received but the post-horse – though to get rid of that noble animal was something. While my fellow-travellers and I were discussing how to pass the night and so much of the next day as must intervene before the jovial blacksmith and the jovial wheelwright would be in a condition to go out on the morass and mend the coach, an honest man stepped forth from the crowd and proposed his unlet floor of two rooms, with supper of eggs and bacon, ale and punch. We joyfully accompanied him home to the strangest of clean houses, where we were well entertained to the satisfaction of all parties. But, the novel feature of the entertainment was, that our host was a chair-maker, and that the chairs assigned to us were mere frames, altogether without bottoms of any sort; so that we passed the evening on perches. Nor was this the absurdest consequence; for when we unbent at supper, and any one of us gave way to laughter, he forgot the peculiarity of his position, and instantly disappeared. I myself, doubled up in an attitude from which self-extrication was impossible, was taken out of my frame, like a clown in a comic pantomime who has tumbled into a tub, five times by the taper’s light during the eggs and bacon.

The Holly-Tree was fast reviving within me a sense of loneliness. I began to feel conscious that my subject would never carry me on until I was dug out. I might be a week here – weeks!

There was a story with a singular idea in it, connected with an inn I once passed a night at, in a picturesque old town on the Welsh border. In a large, double-bedded room of this inn there had been a suicide committed by poison, in one bed, while a tired traveller slept unconscious in the other. After that time, the suicide bed was never used, but the other constantly was; the disused bedstead remaining in the room empty, though as to all other respects in its old state. The story ran that whoever slept in this room, though never so entire a stranger, from never so far off, was invariably observed to come down in the morning with the impression that he smelled laudanum; and that his mind always turned upon the subject of suicide; to which, whatever kind of man he might be, he was certain to make some reference if he conversed with anyone. This went on for years, until it at length induced the landlord to take the disused bedstead down, and bodily burn it – bed, hangings, and all.

The strange influence (this was the story) now changed to a fainter one, but never changed afterward. The occupant of that room, with occasional but very rare exceptions, would come down in the morning, trying to recall a forgotten dream he had had in the night. The landlord, on mentioning his perplexity, would suggest various commonplace subjects, not one of which, as he very well knew, was the true subject. But the moment the landlord suggested “poison,” the traveller started, and cried “Yes!” He never failed to accept that suggestion, and he never recalled any more of the dream.

This reminiscence brought the Welsh inns, in general, before me; with the women in their round hats, and the harpers with their white beards (venerable, but humbugs, I am afraid) playing outside the door while I took my dinner. The transition was natural to the Highland inns, with the oatmeal bannocks, the honey, the venison steaks, the trout from the loch, the whisky, and perhaps (having the materials so temptingly at hand) the Athol brose. Once, was I coming south from the Scottish Highlands in hot haste, hoping to change quickly at the station at the bottom of a certain wild historical glen, when these eyes did with mortification see the landlord come out with a telescope and sweep the whole prospect for the horses: which horses were away picking up their own living, and did not heave in sight under four hours. Having thought of the loch-trout, I was taken by quick association to the Anglers’ Inns of England (I have assisted at innumerable feats of angling, by lying in the bottom of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the greatest perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual toward the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science); and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those inns overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait [island], and the church spire, and the country bridge; and to the peerless Emma with the bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural grace that would have converted Blue Beard.

Casting my eyes upon my Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing coals, the pictures of a score or more of those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all so sorry to have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which are such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion. He who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from Basingstoke or even Windsor to London, by way of Hounslow, and moralize on their perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust; unsettled labourers and wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses; grass growing in the yards; the rooms where erst so many hundred beds of down were made up, let off to Irish lodgers at eighteen-pence a-week; a little ill-looking beer-shop shrinking in the tap of former days, burning coach-house gates for fire-wood, having one of its two windows bunged up, as if it had received punishment in a fight with the railroad; a low, bandy-legged, brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway. What could I next see in my fire, so naturally, as the new railway-house of these times near the dismal country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no business doing, beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the hall? Then, I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of four pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the privilege of ringing the bell all day long without influencing anybody’s mind or body but your own, and the not-too-much-for dinner, considering the price. Next, to the provincial inns of France, with the great church-tower rising above the courtyard, the horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and the clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which are never right, unless taken at the precise minute when by getting exactly twelve hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become so. Away I went, next, to the lesser roadside inns of Italy; where all the dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you can, and forget what you can’t; where I should again like to be boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a tea-pot. So, to the old palace inns and old monastery inns, in towns and cities of the same bright country; with their massive quadrangular staircases, whence you may look from among clustering pillars high into the blue vault of Heaven; with their stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with their labyrinths of ghostly bed-chambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous streets that have no appearance of reality or possibility. So, to the close little inns of the malaria districts, with their pale attendants, and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air. So, to the immense fantastic inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on the particular little bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never released while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark’s Cathedral tolling midnight.

Next, I put up for a minute at the restless inns upon the Rhine, where your going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears to be the tocsin for everybody else’s getting up; and where, in the table-d’hôte room at the end of the long table (with several Towers of Babel on it at the other end, all made of white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will remain all night, clinking glasses, and singing about the river that flows and the grape that grows and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my brother, and all the rest of it. I departed thence, as a matter of course, to other German inns, where all the eatables are sodden down to the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of hot puddings, and boiled cherries sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected periods of the repast. After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the windows of the student beer-houses at Heidelberg and elsewhere, I put out to sea for the inns of America, with their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every day. Again, I stood in the bar-rooms thereof, taking my evening cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail. Again, I listened to my friend the General – whom I had known for five minutes, in the course of which period he had made me intimate for life with two Majors, who again had made me intimate for life with three Colonels, who again had made me brother to twenty-two civilians – again, I say, I listened to my friend the General, leisurely expounding the resources of the establishment, as to gentlemen’s morning-room, sir; ladies’ morning-room, sir; gentlemen’s evening room, sir; ladies’ evening room, sir; ladies’ and gentlemen’s evening reuniting-room, sir; music-room, sir; reading room, sir; over four hundred sleeping rooms, sir; and the entire planned and finished within twelve calendar months from the first clearing off of the old incumbrances on the plot, at a cost of five hundred thousand dollars, sir. Again I found, as to my individual way of thinking, that the greater, the more gorgeous, and the more dollarous, the establishment was, the less desirable it was. Nevertheless, again I drank my cobbler, julep, sling, or cocktail, in all good-will, to my friend the General, and my friends the Majors, Colonels, and civilians, all; full-well knowing that whatever little motes my beamy eyes may have descried in theirs, they belong to a kind, generous, large-hearted, and great people.

I had been going on lately, at a quick pace, to keep my solitude out of my mind; but here I broke down for good, and gave up the subject. What was I to do? What was to become of me? Into what extremity was I submissively to sink? Supposing that, like Baron Trenck, I looked out for a mouse or spider, and found one, and beguiled my imprisonment by training it? Even that might be dangerous with a view to the future. I might be so far gone when the road did come to be cut through the snow, that, on my way forth, I might burst into tears, and beseech, like the prisoner who was released in his old age from the Bastile, to be taken back again to the five windows, the ten curtains, and the sinuous drapery.

A desperate idea came into my head. Under any other circumstances I should have rejected it; but, in the strait at which I was, I held it fast. Could I so far overcome the inherent bashfulness which withheld me from the landlord’s table and the company I might find there, as to make acquaintance, under various pretences, with some of the inmates of the house, singly – with the objects of getting from each, either a whole autobiography, or a passage or experience in one, with which I could cheat the tardy time: first of all by seeking out, then by listening to, then by remembering and writing down? Could I, I asked myself, so far overcome my retiring nature as to do this? I could, I would, I did.

The results of this conception I proceed to give, in the exact order in which I attained them. I begun my plan of operations at once, and, by slow approaches and after overcoming many obstacles (all of my own making, I believe), reached the story of:

THE OSTLER

I find an old man, fast asleep, in one of the stalls of the stable. It is midday, and rather a strange time for an ostler to devote to sleep. Something curious, too, about the man’s face. A withered, woebegone face. The eyebrows painfully contracted; the mouth fast set, and drawn down at the corners; the hollow cheeks sadly, and, as I cannot help fancying, prematurely wrinkled; the scanty, grizzled hair, telling weakly its own tale of some past sorrow or suffering. How fast he draws his. breath, too, for a man asleep! He is talking in his sleep! “Wake up!” I hear him say, in a quick whisper through his fast-clenched teeth. “Wake up there! Murder! O Lord help me! Lord help me, alone in this place!”

He stops, and sighs again – moves one lean arm slowly, till it rests over his throat – shudders a little, and turns on his straw – the arm leaves his throat – the hand stretches itself out, and clutches at the side toward which he has turned, as if he fancies himself to be grasping at the edge of something. Is he waking? No – there is the whisper again; he is still talking in his sleep.

“Light grey eyes,” he says now, “and a droop in the left eyelid. Yes! yes I – flaxen hair with a gold-yellow streak in it – all right, mother – fair, white arms with a down on them – little lady’s hand, with a reddish look under the fingernails – and the knife – always the cursed Knife – first on one side, then on the other. Aha! you she-devil, where’s the knife? Never mind, mother – too late now. I’ve promised to marry, and marry I must. Murder! wake up there! for God’s sake, wake up!”

At the last words his voice rises, and he grows so restless on a sudden, that I draw back quietly to the door. I see him shudder on the straw – his withered face grows distorted – he throws up both his hands with a quick, hysterical grasp; they strike against the bottom of the manger under which he lies; the blow awakens him; I have just time to slip through the door before his eyes are fairly open and his senses are his own again.

What I have seen and heard has so startled and shocked me, that I feel my heart beating fast, as I softly and quickly retrace my steps across the inn-yard. The discomposure that is going on within me, apparently shows itself in my face; for, as I get back to the covered way leading to the inn stairs, the landlord, who is just coming out of the house to ring some bell in the yard, stops astonished, and asks what is the matter with me? I tell him what I have just seen.

“Aha!” says the landlord, with an air of relief. “I understand now. Poor old chap! He was only dreaming his old dream over again. There’s the queerest story – of a dreadful kind, too, mind you – connected with him and his dream that ever was told.” I entreat the landlord to tell me the story. After a little hesitation he complies with my request.

Some years ago, there lived in the suburbs of a large seaport town, on the west coast of England, a man in humble circumstances, by name Isaac Scatchard. His means of subsistence were derived from any employment that he could get, as an ostler; and, occasionally, when times went well with him, from temporary engagements in service, as stable helper in private houses. Though a faithful, steady, and honest man, he got on badly in his calling. His ill-luck was proverbial among his neighbours. He was always missing good opportunities, by no fault of his own; and always living longest in service with amiable people who were not punctual payers of wages. “Unlucky Isaac” was his nickname in his own neighbourhood – and no one could say that he did not richly deserve it.

With far more than one man’s fair share of adversity to endure, Isaac had but one consolation to support him – and that was of the dreariest and most negative kind. He had no wife and children to increase his anxieties and add to the bitterness of his various failures in life. It might have been from mere insensibility, or it might have been from generous unwillingness to involve another in his own unlucky destiny – but the fact undoubtedly was, that he arrived at the middle term of life without marrying; and, what is much more remarkable, without once exposing himself, from eighteen to eight and thirty, to the genial imputation of ever having had a sweetheart. When he was out of service, he lived alone with his widowed mother. Mrs. Scatchard was a woman about the average in her lowly station, as to capacities and manners. She had seen better days, as the phrase is; but she never referred to them in the presence of curious visitors: and, though perfectly polite to every one who approached her, never cultivated any intimacies among her neighbours. She contrived to provide, hardly enough, for her simple wants, by doing rough work for the tailors, and always managed to keep a decent home for her son to return to, whenever his ill-luck drove him out helpless into the world.

One bleak, autumn when Isaac was getting on fast toward forty, and when he was, as usual, out of place, through no fault of his own, he set forth from his mother’s cottage on a long walk inland to a gentleman’s seat, where he had heard that a stable helper was required. It wanted then but two days of his birthday; and Mrs. Scatchard, with her usual fondness, made him promise, before he started, that he would be back in time to keep that anniversary with her, in as festive a way as their poor means would allow. It was easy for him to comply with this request, even supposing he slept a night each way on the road. He was to start from home on Monday morning; and, whether he got the new place or not, he was to be back for his birthday dinner Wednesday at two o’clock.

Arriving at his destination too late on the Monday night to make application for the stable helper’s place, he slept at the village inn, and, in good time on the Tuesday morning, presented himself at the gentleman’s house, to fill the vacant situation. Here, again, his ill-luck pursued him as inexorably as ever. The excellent written testimonials as to character which he was able to produce, availed him nothing; his long walk had been taken in vain – only the day before the stable helper’s place had been given to another man.

Isaac accepted this new disappointment resignedly, and as a matter of course. Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men with sluggishly-working mental powers. He thanked the gentleman’s steward, with his usual quiet civility, for granting him an interview, and took his departure with no appearance of unusual depression in his face or manner. Before starting on his homeward walk, he made some inquiries at the inn, and ascertained that he might save a few miles, on his return, by following a new road. Furnished with full instructions, several times repeated, as to the various turnings he was to take, he set forth for his homeward journey, and walked on all day with only one stoppage for bread and cheese. Just as it was getting toward dark, the rain came on and the wind began to rise; and he found himself, to make matters worse, in a part of the country with which he was entirely unacquainted, though he knew himself to be some fifteen miles from home. The first house he found to inquire at was a lonely roadside inn, standing on the outskirts of a thick wood. Solitary as the place looked, it was welcome to a lost man who was also hungry, thirsty, footsore, and wet. The landlord was a civil, respectable-looking man; and the price he asked for a bed was reasonable enough. Isaac, therefore, decided on stopping comfortably at the inn for that night.

He was constitutionally a temperate man. His supper simply consisted of two rashers of bacon, a slice of home made bread, and a pint of ale. He did not go to bed immediately after this moderate meal, but sat up with the landlord talking about his bad prospects and his long run of ill-luck, and diverging from these topics to the subject of horse-flesh and racing. Nothing was said either by himself, his host, or the few labourers who strayed into the tap-room, which could, in the slightest degree, excite the very small and very dull imaginative faculty which Isaac Scatchard possessed.

At a little after eleven the house was closed. Isaac went round with the landlord and held the candle while the doors and lower windows were being secured. He noticed with surprise the strength of the bolts, bars and iron-sheathed shutters.

“You see, we are rather lonely here,” said the landlord. “We never have had any attempts made to break in yet, but it’s always as well to be on the safe side. When nobody is sleeping here, I am the only man in the house. My wife and daughter are timid, and the servant-girl takes after her missusses. Another glass of ale, before you turn in? No! – Well, how such a sober man as you comes to be out of place is more than I can make out, for one. Here’s where you’re to sleep. You’re our only lodger tonight, and I think you’ll say my missus has done her best to make you comfortable. You’re quite sure you won’t have another glass of ale? Very well. Good-night.”

It was half-past eleven by the clock in the passage as they went upstairs to the bedroom, the window of which looked on to the wood at the back of the house. Isaac locked the door, set his candle on the chest of drawers, and wearily got ready for bed. The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, monotonous, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night-silence. Isaac felt strangely wakeful, and resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle a-light until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moaning of the wind in the wood.

Sleep stole on him before he was aware of it. His eyes closed, and he fell off insensibly to rest, without having so much as thought of extinguishing the candle.

•   •   •

The first sensation of which he was conscious after sinking into slumber, was a strange shivering that ran through him suddenly from head to foot, and a dreadful sinking pain at the heart, such as he had never felt before. The shivering only disturbed his slumbers – the pain woke him instantly. In a moment he passed from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness – his eyes wide open – his mental perceptions cleared on a sudden as if by a miracle.

The candle had burned down nearly to the last morsel of tallow; but the top of the unsnuffed wick had just fallen off, and the light in the little room was, for the moment, fair and full. Between the foot of his bed and the closed door there stood a woman with a knife in her hand, looking at him. lie was stricken speechless with terror, but he did not lose the preternatural clearness of his faculties; and he never took his eyes off the woman. She said not one word as they stared each other in the face; but she began to move slowly toward the left-hand side of the bed.

His eyes followed her. She was a fair, fine woman, with yellowish flaxen hair, and light, grey eyes, with a droop in the left eyelid. He noticed these things and fixed them on his mind, before she was round at the side of the bed. Speechless, with no expression in her face, with no noise following her footfall, – she came closer and closer – stopped – and slowly raised the knife. He laid his right arm over his throat to save it; but, as he saw the knife coming down, threw his hand across the bed to the right side, and jerked his body over that way, just as the knife descended on the mattress within an inch of his shoulder.

His eyes fixed on her arm and hand, as she slowly drew the knife out of the bed. A white, well-shaped arm, with a pretty down lying lightly over the fair skin. A delicate, lady’s band, with the crowning beauty of a pink flush under and round the finger nails.

She drew the knife out, and passed back again slowly to the foot of the bed; stopped there for a moment looking at him; then came on – still speechless, still with no expression on the blank, beautiful face, still with no sound following the stealthy footfalls – came on to the right side of the bed where he now lay. As she approached, she raised the knife again, and he drew himself away to the left side. She struck, as before, right into the mattress, with a deliberate, perpendicularly downward action of the arm. This time his eyes wandered from her to the knife. It was like the large clasp knives which he had often seen labouring men use to cut their bread and bacon with. Her delicate little fingers did not conceal more than two-thirds of the handle; he noticed that it was made of buck-horn, clean and shining as the blade was, and looking like new.

For the second time she drew the knife out, concealed it in the wide sleeve of her gown, then stopped by the bedside, watching him. For an instant he saw her standing in that position – then the wick of the spent candle fell over into the socket. The flame diminished to a little blue point, and the room grew dark. A moment, or less, if possible, passed so – and then the wick flamed up, smokily, for the last time. His eyes were still looking eagerly over the right-hand side of the bed when the final flash of light came, but they discerned nothing. The fair woman with the knife was gone.

The conviction that he was alone again, weakened the hold of the terror that had struck him dumb up to this time. The preternatural sharpness which the very intensity of his panic had mysteriously imparted to his faculties, left them suddenly. His brain grew confused – his heart beat wildly – his ears opened for the first time since the appearance of the woman, to a sense of the woeful, ceaseless moaning of the wind among the trees. With the dreadful conviction of the reality of what he had seen, still strong within him, he leaped out of bed, and screaming – “Murder! – Wake up, there, wake up!” – dashed headlong through the darkness to the door.

It was fast locked, exactly as he had left it on going to bed.

His cries on starting up had alarmed the house. He heard the terrified, confused exclamations of women; he saw the master of the house approaching along the passage, with his burning rush-candle in one hand, and his gun in the other. “What is it?” asked the landlord, breathlessly. Isaac would only answer in a whisper: “A woman with a knife in her hand,” he gasped out. “In my room – a fair, yellow-haired woman; she jobbed at me with the knife, twice over.”

The landlord’s pale cheeks grew paler. lie looked at Isaac eagerly by the flickering light of his candle; and his face began to get red again – his voice altered, too, as well as his complexion.

“She seems to have missed you twice,” he said. “I dodged the knife as it came down,” Isaac went on, in the same scared whisper. “It struck the bed each time.”

The landlord took his candle into the bedroom immediately. In less than a minute he came out again into the passage in a violent passion.

“The devil fly away with you and your woman with the knife! What do you mean by coming into a man’s place and frightening his family out of their wits about a dream?”

“I’ll leave your house,” said Isaac, faintly. “Better out on the road, in rain and dark, on my way home, than back again in that room after what I’ve seen in it. Lend me a light to get on my clothes by, and tell me what I’m to pay.”

“Pay!” cried the landlord, leading the way with his light sulkily into his bedroom. “You’ll find your score on the slate when you go downstairs. I wouldn’t have taken you in for all the money you’ve got about you, if I’d known your dreaming, screeching ways beforehand. Look at the bed. Where’s the cut of a knife in it? Look at the window – is the lock bursted? Look at the door (which I heard you fasten myself) – is it broke in? A murdering woman with a knife in my house? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” Isaac answered not a word. He huddled on his clothes; and then they went downstairs together.

“Nigh on twenty minutes past two!” said the landlord, as they passed the clock. “A nice time in the morning to frighten honest people out of their wits!”

Isaac paid his bill, and the landlord let him out of the front door, asking with a grin of contempt, as he undid the strong fastenings whether the “murdering woman got in that way?” They parted without a word on either side. The rain had ceased; but the night was dark, and the wind bleaker than ever. Little did the darkness, or the cold, or the uncertainty about his way home, matter to Isaac. If he had been turned out into a wilderness in a thunder-storm, it would have been a relief, after what he had suffered in the bedroom of the inn.

What was the fair woman with the knife? The creature of a dream, or that other creature from the unknown world called among men by the name of ghost? He could make nothing of the mystery – had made nothing of it, even when it was midday on Wednesday, and when he stood, at last, after many times missing his road, once more on the doorstep of home.

His mother came out early to receive him. His face told her in a moment that something was wrong. “I’ve lost the place; but that’s my luck. I dreamed an ill dream last night, mother – or, may be, I saw a ghost. Take it either way, it scared me out of my senses, and I’m not my own man again yet.”

“Isaac! your face frightens me. Come into the fire. Come in, and tell mother all about it.”

He was as anxious to tell as she was to hear: for it had been his hope, all the way home, that his mother, with her quicker capacity and superior knowledge, might be able to throw some light on the mystery which he could not clear up for himself. His memory of the dream was still mechanically vivid, though his thoughts were entirely confused by it.

His mother’s face grew paler and paler as he went on. She never interrupted him by so much as a single word; but when he had done, she moved her chair close to his, put her arm around his neck, and said to him: “Isaac, you dreamed your ill dream on this Wednesday morning. What time was it when you saw this fair woman with the knife in her hand?”

Isaac reflected on what the landlord had said when they passed by the clock on his leaving the inn – allowed as nearly as he could for the time that must have elapsed between the unlocking of his bedroom door and the paying of his bill just before going away and answered:

“Somewhere about two o’clock in the morning.”

His mother suddenly quitted her hold of his neck, and struck her hands together with a gesture of despair. “This Wednesday is your birthday, Isaac; and two o’clock in the morning was the time when you were born!”

Isaac’s capacities were not quick enough to catch the infection of his mother’s superstitious dread. He was amazed and a little startled also, when she suddenly rose from her chair, opened her old writing-desk, took out pen, ink and paper, and then said to him:

“Your memory is but a poor one, Isaac, and now I’m an old woman, mine’s not much better. I want all about this dream of yours to be as well known to both of us, years hence, as it is now. Tell me over again all you told me a minute ago, when you spoke of what the woman with the knife looked like.”

Isaac obeyed, and marvelled much as he saw his mother carefully set down on paper the very words that he was saying. “Light grey eyes,” she wrote, as they came to the descriptive part, “with a droop in the left eyelid. Flaxen hair, with a gold yellow streak in it. White arms, with a down on them. Little lady’s hand, with a reddish look about the fingernails. Clasp-knife with a buck-horn handle, that seemed as good as new.” To these particulars, Mrs. Scatchard added the year, month, day of the week, and time in the morning, when the woman of the dream appeared to her son. She then locked up the paper carefully in her writing-desk.

Neither on that day, nor on any day after, could her son induce her to return to the matter of the dream. She obstinately kept her thoughts about it to herself, and even refused to refer again to the paper in her writing-desk. Ere long, Isaac grew weary of attempting to make her break her resolute silence; and time, which sooner or later, wears out all things, gradually wore out the impression produced on him by the dream. He began by thinking of it carelessly, and he ended by not thinking of it at all. This result was the more easily brought about by the advent of some important changes for the better in his prospects, which commenced not long after his terrible night’s experience at the inn. He reaped at last the reward of his long and patient suffering under adversity, by getting an excellent place, keeping it for seven years, and leaving it, on the death of his master, not only with an excellent character, but also with a comfortable annuity bequeathed to him as a reward for saving his mistress’s life in a carriage accident. Thus it happened, that Isaac Scatchard returned to his old mother, seven years after the time of the dream at the inn, with an annual sum of money at his disposal, sufficient to keep them both in ease and independence for the rest of their lives.

The mother, whose health had been bad of late years, profited so much by the care bestowed on her and by freedom from money anxieties, that when Isaac’s next birthday came round, she was able to sit up comfortably at the table and dine with him.

On that day, as the evening drew on, Mrs. Scatchard discovered that a bottle of tonic medicine – which she was accustomed to take, and in which she had fancied that a dose or more was still left – happened to be empty. Isaac immediately volunteered to go to the chemist’s, and get it filled again. It was as rainy and bleak an autumn night as on the memorable past occasion when he lost his way and slept at the roadside inn.

On going to the chemist’s shop, he was passed hurriedly by a poorly dressed woman coming out of it. The glimpse he had of her face struck him, and he looked back after her as she descended the doorsteps. “You’re noticing that woman?” said the chemist’s apprentice behind the counter. “It’s my opinion there’s something wrong with her. She’s been asking for laudanum to put to a bad tooth. Master’s out for half an hour; and I told her I wasn’t allowed to sell poison to strangers in his absence. She laughed in a queer way, and said she would come back in half an hour. If she expects master to serve her, I think she’ll be disappointed. It’s a case of suicide, if ever there was one yet.”

These words added immeasurably to the sudden interest in the woman which Isaac had felt at the first sight of her face. After he had got the medicine bottle filled, he looked about anxiously for her, as soon as he was out in the street. She was walking slowly up and down on the opposite side of the road. With his heart, very much to his own surprise, beating fast, Isaac crossed over and spoke to her.

He asked if she was in any distress. She pointed to her torn shawl, her scanty dress, her crushed, dirty bonnet – then moved under a lamp so as to let the light fall on her stern, pale, but still most beautiful face. “I look like a comfortable, happy woman – don’t I?” she said with a bitter laugh.

She spoke with a purity of intonation which Isaac had never heard before from other than ladies’ lips. H|er slightest actions seemed to have the easy negligent grace of a thoroughbred woman. Her skin, for all its poverty-stricken paleness, was as delicate as if her life had been passed in the enjoyment of every social comfort that wealth can purchase. Even her small, finely-shaped hands, gloveless as they were, had not lost their whiteness.

Little by little, in answer to his question, the sad story of the woman came out. There is no need to relate it here; it is told over and over again in police reports and paragraphs about attempted suicides.

“My name is Rebecca Murdock,” said the woman, as she ended. “I have ninepence left, and I thought of spending it at the chemist’s over the way in securing a passage to the other world. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse to me than this – so why should I stop here?”

Besides the natural compassion and sadness moved in his heart by what he heard, Isaac felt within him some mysterious influence at work all the time the woman was speaking, which utterly confused his ideas and almost deprived him of his powers of speech. All that he could say in answer to her last reckless words was, that he would prevent her from attempting her own life, if he followed her about all night to do it. His rough, trembling earnestness seemed to impress her.

“I won’t occasion you that trouble,” she answered, when he repeated his threat. “You have given me a fancy for living by speaking kindly to me. No need for the mockery of protestations and promises. You may believe me without them. Come to Fuller’s Meadow tomorrow at twelve, and you will find me alive, to answer for myself. No! – no money. My ninepence will do to get me as good a night’s lodging as I want.”

She nodded and left him. He made no attempt to follow – he felt no suspicion that she was deceiving him.

“It’s strange, but I can’t help believing her,” he said to himself – and walked away, bewildered, toward home. On entering the house his mind was still so completely absorbed by its new subject of interest, that he took no notice of what his mother was doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine. She had opened her old writing-desk in his absence, and was now reading a paper attentively that lay inside it. On every birthday of Isaac’s since she had written down the particulars of his dream from his own lips, she had been accustomed to read that same paper, and ponder over it in private.

The next day he went to Fuller’s Meadow. He had done only right in believing her so implicitly – she was there, punctual to a minute, to answer for herself. The last-left faint defences in Isaac’s heart against the fascination which a word or look from her began inscrutably to exercise over him, sank down and vanished before her forever on that memorable morning.

When a man, previously insensible to the influence of woman, forms an attachment in middle life, the instances are rare, indeed, let the warning circumstances be what they may, in which he is found capable of freeing himself from the tyranny of the new ruling passion. The charm of being spoken to familiarly, fondly and gratefully by a woman whose language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement to hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac’s rank at the age of twenty. But it was far more than that – it was certain ruin to him – now that his heart was opening unworthily to a new influence, at that middle time of life when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most stubbornly in a man’s moral nature. A few more stolen interviews after that first morning in Fuller’s Meadow completed his infatuation. In less than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard had consented to give Rebecca Murdock a new interest in existence and a chance of recovering the character she had lost, by promising to make her his wife.

She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties as well. All arrangements for the present, and all plans for the future were of her devising. All the mind he had he put in her keeping. She directed him on every point; even instructing him how to break the news of his approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.

“If you tell her how you met me and who I am at first,” said the cunning woman, “she will move heaven and earth to prevent our marriage. Say I am the sister of one of your fellow-servants – ask her to see me before you go into any more particulars – and leave it to me to do the rest. I want to make her love me next best to you, Isaac, before she knows anything of who I really am.”

The motive of the deceit was sufficient to sanctify it to Isaac. The stratagem proposed relieved him of his one great anxiety, and quieted his uneasy conscience on the subject of his mother. Still, there was something wanting to perfect his happiness, something that he could not realize, something mysteriously untraceable, and yet, something that perpetually made itself felt; not when he was absent from Rebecca Murdoch, but, strange to say, when he was actually in her presence! She was kindness itself with him; she never made him feel his inferior capacities, and inferior manners, – she showed the sweetest anxiety to please him in the smallest trifles; but, in spite of all these attractions, he never could feel quite at his ease with her. At their first meeting, there had mingled with his admiration when he looked in her face, a faint involuntary feeling of doubt whether that face was entirely strange to him. No after familiarity had the slightest effect on this inexplicable, wearisome uncertainty.

Concealing the truth as he had been directed, he announced his marriage engagement precipitately and confusedly to his mother, on the day when he contracted it. Poor Mrs. Scatchard showed her perfect confidence in her son by flinging her arms round his neck, and giving him joy at having found at last, in the sister of one of his fellow-servants, a woman to comfort and care for him after his mother was gone. She was all eagerness to see the woman of her son’s choice ; and the next day was fixed for the introduction.

It was a bright sunny morning, and the little cottage parlour was full of light, as Mrs. Scatchard, happy and expectant, dressed for the occasion in her Sunday gown, sat waiting for her son and her future daughter-in-law, Punctual to the appointed time, Isaac hurriedly and nervously led his promised wife into the room. His mother rose to receive her – advanced a few steps, smiling – looked Rebecca full in the eyes – and suddenly stopped. Her face, which had been flushed the moment before, turned white in an instant – her eyes lost their expression of softness and kindness, and assumed a blank look of terror – her outstretched hands fell to her sides, and she staggered back a few steps with a low cry to her son.

“Isaac!” she whispered, clutching him fast by the arm, when he asked alarmedly if she was taken ill. “Isaac! Does that woman’s face remind you of nothing?”

Before he could answer; before he could look round to where Rebecca, astonished and angered by her reception, stood at the lower end of the room; his mother pointed impatiently to her writing-desk, and gave him the key.

“Open it,” she said, in a quick, breathless whisper.

“What does this mean ? Why am I treated as if I had no business here? Does your mother want to insult me?” asked Rebecca, angrily.

“Open it, and give me the paper in the left-hand drawer. Quick! quick, for Heaven’s sake!” said Mrs. Scatchard, shrinking further back in terror. Isaac gave her the paper. She looked it over eagerly for a moment – then followed Rebecca, who was now turning away haughtily to leave the room, and caught her by the shoulder – abruptly raised the long, loose sleeve of her gown, and glanced at her hand and arm. Something like fear began to steal over the angry expression of Rebecca’s face as she shook herself free from the old woman’s grasp. “Mad!” she said to herself; “and Isaac never told me.” With these few words she left the room.

Isaac was hastening after her when his mother turned and stopped his farther progress. It wrung his heart to see the misery and terror in her face as she looked at him.

“Light grey eyes,” she said, in low, mournful, awestruck tones, pointing toward the open door. “A droop in the left eyelid. Flaxen hair with a gold-yellow streak in it. White arms with a down on them. Little lady’s hands with a reddish look under the fingernails. The Woman of the dream! – Oh, Heaven! Isaac, the woman of the dream!”

That faint cleaving doubt which he had never been able to shake off in Rebecca Murdoch’s presence, was fatally set at rest forever, he had seen her face, then, before – seven years before, on his birthday, in the bedroom of the lonely inn. “The woman of the dream!”

“Be warned, oh, my son! be warned! Isaac! Isaac! let her go, and do you stop with me!”

Something darkened the parlour window, as those words were said. A sudden chill ran through him, and he glanced sidelong at the shadow. Rebecca Murdock had come back. She was peering in curiously at them over the low window blind.

“I have promised to marry, mother,” he said, “and marry I must.”

The tears came into his eyes as he spoke, and dimmed his sight; but he could just discern the fatal face outside moving away again from the window.

His mother’s head sank lower.

“Are you faint?” he whispered.

“Broken-hearted, Isaac.”

He stooped down and kissed her. The shadow, as he did so, returned to the window; and the fatal face peered in curiously once more.

Three weeks after that day, Isaac and Rebecca were man and wife. All that was hopelessly dogged and stubborn in the man’s moral nature, seemed to have closed round his fatal passion, and to have fixed it unassailable in his heart.

After that first interview in the cottage parlour, no consideration would induce Mrs. Scatchard to see her son’s wife again, or even to talk of her when Isaac tried hard to plead her cause after their marriage. This course of conduct was not in any degree occasioned by a discovery of the degradation in which Rebecca had lived. There was no question of anything but the fearfully exact resemblance between the living, breathing woman and the spectre woman of Isaac’s dream. Rebecca, on her side, neither felt nor expressed the slightest sorrow at the estrangement between herself and her mother-in-law. Isaac, for the sake of peace, had never contradicted her first idea that age and long illness had affected Mrs. Scatchard’s mind. He even allowed his wife to upbraid him for not having confessed this to her at the time of their marriage engagement, rather than risk anything by hinting at the truth. The sacrifice of his integrity before his one all-mastering delusion, seemed but a small thing, and cost his conscience but little, after the sacrifices he had already made.

The time of waking from his delusion – the cruel and the rueful time – was not far off. After some quiet months of married life, as the summer was ending, and the year was getting on toward the month of his birthday, Isaac found his wife altering toward him. She grew sullen and contemptuous – she formed acquaintances of the most dangerous kind, in defiance of his objections, his entreaties, and his commands, – and worst of all, she learned, ere long, after every fresh difference with her husband, to seek the deadly self-oblivion of drink. Little by little, after the first miserable discovery that his wife was keeping company with drunkards, the shocking certainty forced itself on Isaac that she had grown to be a drunkard herself.

He had been in a sadly desponding state for some time before the occurrence of these domestic calamities. His mother’s health, as he could but too plainly discern every time he went to see her at the cottage, was failing fast; and lie upbraided himself in secret as the cause of the bodily and mental suffering she endured. When, to his remorse on his mother’s account, was added the shame and misery occasioned by the discovery of his wife’s degradation, he sank under the double trial – his face began to alter fast, and he looked what he was, a spirit-broken man. His mother, still struggling bravely against the illness that was hurrying her to the grave, was the first to notice the sad alteration in him, and the first to hear of his last bitterest trouble with his wife. She could only weep bitterly, on the day when he made his humiliating confession; but on the next occasion when he went to see her, she had taken a resolution, in reference to his domestic afflictions, which astonished, and even alarmed him. Me found her dressed to go out, and on asking the reason, received this answer:

“I am not long for this world, Isaac,” said she; “and I shall not feel easy on my deathbed, unless I have done my best, to the last, to make my son happy. I mean to put my own fears and my own feelings out of the question, and to go with you to your wife, and try what I can do to reclaim her. Give me your arm, Isaac; and let me do the last thing I can in this world to help my son before it is too late.”

He could not disobey her; and they walked together slowly toward his miserable home. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon when they reached the cottage where he lived. It was their dinner hour, and Rebecca was in the kitchen. He was thus able to take his mother quietly into the parlour, and then prepare his wife for the interview. She had fortunately drank but little at that early hour, and she was less sullen and capricious than usual. He returned to his mother, with his mind tolerably at ease. His wife soon followed him into the parlour, and the meeting between her and Mrs. Scatchard passed off better than he had ventured to anticipate: though he observed, with secret apprehension, that his mother, resolutely as she controlled herself in other respects, could not look his wife in the face when she spoke to her. It was a relief to him therefore, when Rebecca began to lay the cloth.

She laid the cloth – brought in the bread-tray, and cut a slice from the loaf for her husband – then returned to the kitchen. At that moment, Isaac, still anxiously watching his mother, was startled by seeing the same ghastly change pass over her face which had altered it so awfully on the morning when Rebecca and she first met. Before he could say a word she whispered with a look of horror:

“Take me back! – home, home, again, Isaac! Come with me, and never come back again.”

He was afraid to ask for an explanation, – he could only sign to her to be silent, and help her quickly to the door. As they passed the bread-tray on the table she stooped and pointed to it,

“Did you see what your wife cut your bread with?” she asked, in a low, still whisper.

“No, mother, – I was not noticing – what was it?”

“Look!”

He did look. A new clasp-knife, with a buck-horn handle lay with the loaf in the bread-tray. He stretched out his hand, shudderingly, to possess himself of it; but at the same time, there was a noise in the kitchen, and his mother caught at his arm.

“The knife of the dream! – Isaac, I’m faint with fear – take me away! before she comes back!”

He was hardly able to support her – the visible, tangible reality of the knife struck him with a panic, and utterly destroyed any faint doubts that he might have entertained up to this time, in relation to the mysterious dream-warning of nearly eight years before. By a last desperate effort, he summoned self-possession enough to help his mother quietly out of the house – so quietly, that the “dream-woman” (he thought of her by that name, now!) did not hear them departing from the kitchen.

“Don’t go back, Isaac – don’t go back!” implored Mrs. Scatchard, as he turned to go away, after seeing her safely seated again in her own room.

“I must get the knife,” he answered, under his breath. She tried to stop him again; but he hurried out without another word.

On his return, he found that his wife had discovered their secret departure from the house. She had been drinking, and was in a fury of passion. The dinner in the kitchen was flung under the gate; the cloth was off the parlour table. Where was the knife? Unwisely, he asked for it. She was only too glad of the opportunity of irritating him, which the request afforded her. “He wanted the knife, did he? Could he give her a reason why? – No! – Then he should not have it, – not if he went down on his knees to ask for it.” Further recriminations elicited the fact that she had bought it a bargain – and that she considered it her own especial property. Isaac saw the uselessness of attempting to get the knife by fair means, and determined to search for it, later in the day, in secret. The search was unsuccessful. Night came on, and he left the house to walk about the streets. He was afraid now to sleep in the same room with her.

Three weeks passed. Still sullenly enraged with him, she would not give up the knife; and still that fear of sleeping in the same room with her possessed him. He walked about at night, or dozed in the parlour, or sat watching by his mother’s bedside. Before the expiration of the first week in the new month his mother died. It wanted then but ten days of her son’s birthday. She had longed to live till that anniversary. Isaac was present at her death; and her last words in this world were addressed to him: “Don’t go back, my son, don’t go back!”

He was obliged to go back, if it were only to watch his wife. Exasperated to the last degree by his distrust of her, she had revengefully sought to add a sting to his grief, daring the last days of his mother’s illness, by declaring that she would assert her right to attend the funeral. In spite of all that he could do, or say, she held with wicked pertinacity to her word; and, on the day appointed for the burial, forced herself – inflamed and shameless with drink – into her husband’s presence, and declared that she would walk in the funeral procession to his mother’s grave.

This last worst outrage, accompanied by all that was most insulting in word and look, maddened him for the moment. He struck her. The instant the blow was dealt he repented it. She crouched down, silent in a corner of the room, and eyed him steadily; it was a look that cooled his hot blood, and made him tremble. But there was no time now to think of a means of making atonement. Nothing remained but to risk the worst till the funeral was over. There was but one way of making sure of her. He locked her into her bedroom. When he came back some hours after, he found her sitting, very much altered in look and bearing, by the bedside, with a bundle on her lap. She rose, and faced him quietly, and spoke with a strange stillness in her voice, a strange repose in her eyes, a strange composure in her manner.

“No man has ever struck me twice,” she said, “and my husband shall have no second opportunity. Set the door open and let me go. From this day forth we see each other no more.”

Before he could answer she passed him, and left the room. He saw her walk away up the street.

Would she return? All that night he watched and waited; but no footstep came near the house. The next night, overpowered by fatigue, he lay down in bed, in his clothes, with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning. His slumber was not disturbed. The third night, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, passed, and nothing happened. He lay down on the seventh, still in his clothes, still with the door locked, the key on the table, and the candle burning, but easier in his mind.

Easier in his mind, and in perfect health of body, when he fell off to sleep. But his rest was disturbed. He awoke twice, without any sensation of uneasiness. But the third time it was that never-to-be-forgotten shivering of the night at the lonely inn, that dreadful sinking pain at the heart, which once more aroused him in an instant.

His eyes opened toward the left-hand side of the bed, and there stood The woman of the dream again? – No His wife; the living reality, with the dream-spectre’s face – in the dream-spectre’s attitude; the fair arm up – the knife clasped in the delicate, white hand.

He sprang upon her, almost at the instant of seeing her, and yet not quickly enough to prevent her from hiding the knife. Without a word from him – without a cry from her – he pinioned her in a chair. With one hand he felt up her sleeve – and, there, where the dream-woman had hidden the knife, she had hidden it – the knife with the buck-horn handle, that looked like new.

In the despair of that fearful moment his brain was steady, his heart was calm. He looked at her fixedly, with the knife in his hand, and said these words:

“You told me we should see each other no more, and you have come back. It is my turn, now, to go, and to go, forever. I say that we shall see each other no more; and my word shall not be broken.”

He left her, and set forth into the night. There was a bleak wind abroad, and the smell of recent rain was in the air. The distant church-clocks chimed the quarter as he walked rapidly beyond the last houses in the suburb. He asked the first policeman he met what hour that was, of which the quarter-past had just struck.

The man referred sleepily to his watch, and answered “Two o’clock.” Two in the morning. What day of the month was this day that had just begun? He reckoned it up from the date of his mother’s funeral. The fatal parallel was complete – it was his birthday!

Had he escaped the mortal peril which his dream foretold? or had he only received a second warning? As that ominous doubt forced itself on his mind, he stopped, reflected, and turned buck again toward the city. He was still resolute to hold to his word and never to let her see him more; but there was a thought now in his mind of having her watched and followed. The knife was in his possession – the world was before him: but a new distrust of her – a vague, unspeakable, superstitious dread – had overcome him.

“I must know where she goes, now she thinks I have left her,” he said to himself, as he stole back wearily to the precincts of his house. It was still dark. He had left the candle burning in the bedchamber; but when he looked up at the window of the room now, there was no light in it. He crept cautiously to the house-door. On going away, he remembered to have closed it: on trying it now, he found it open.

He waited outside, never losing sight of the house, till daylight. Then he ventured indoors – listened, and heard nothing – looked into kitchen, scullery, parlour; and found nothing: went up, at last, into the bedroom – it was empty. A pick-lock lay on the floor, betraying how she had gained entrance in the night; and that was the only trace of her.

Whither had she gone? That no mortal tongue could tell him. The darkness had covered her flight; and when the day broke, no man could say where the light found her.

Before leaving the house and the town forever, he gave instructions to a friend and neighbour to sell his furniture for anything that it would fetch, and apply the proceeds to employing the police to trace her. The directions were honestly followed, and the money was all spent; but the inquiries led to nothing. The pick-lock on the bedroom floor remained the one last useless trace of her.

At this point of the narrative the landlord paused, and looked toward the stable-door.

“So far,” he said, “I tell you what was told to me. The little that remains to be added lies within my own experience. Between two and three months after the events I have just been relating, Isaac Scatchard came to me, withered and old-looking before his time, just as you saw him today. He had his testimonials to character with him, and he asked for employment here. I gave him a trial, and liked him in spite of his queer habits. He is as sober, honest, and willing a man as there is in England. As for his restlessness at night, and his sleeping away his leisure time in the day, who can wonder at it after hearing his story? Besides, he never objects to being roused up, when he’s wanted, so there’s not much inconvenience to complain of, after all.”

“I suppose he is afraid of waking out of that dreadful dream in the dark?” said I.

“No,” returned the landlord. “The dream comes back to him so often, that he has got to bear with it by this time resignedly enough. It’s his wife keeps him waking at night, as he has often told me.”

“What! Has she never been heard of yet?”

“Never. Isaac himself has the one perpetual thought about her, that she is alive and looking for him. I believe he wouldn’t let himself drop off to sleep toward two in the morning for a king’s ransom. Two in the morning, he says, is the time when she will find him, one of these days. Two in the morning is the time all the year round, when he likes to be most certain that he has got that clasp knife safe about him. He does not mind being alone, as long as he is awake, except on the night before his birthday, when he firmly believes himself to be in peril of his life. The birthday has only come round once since he has been here; and then he sat up, along with the night-porter. ‘She’s looking for me,’ he always says, when I speak to him on the one theme of his life; ‘she’s looking for me.’ He may be right. She may be looking for him. Who can tell?”

“Who can tell?” said I.

•   •   •   •   •

THE BOOTS

Where had he been in his time? he repeated when I asked him the question. Lord, he had been everywhere! And what had he been? Bless you, he had been every thing you could mention a’most.

Seen a good deal? Why, of course he had. I should say so, he could assure me, if I only knew about a twentieth part of what had come in his way. Why, it would be easier for him, he expected, to tell what he hadn’t seen, than what he had. Ah! A deal, it would.

What was the curiousest thing he had seen? Well! He didn’t know. He couldn’t momently mime what was the curiousest thing he had seen – unless it was a unicorn – and he see him once, at a fair. But, supposing a young gentleman not eight year old, was to run away with a fine young woman of seven, might I think that a queer start? Certainly! Then, that was a part as he himself had had his blessed eyes on – and he had cleaned the shoes they run away in – and they were so little that he couldn’t get his hand into ’em.

Master Harry Walmers’ father, you see, he lived at the Elmses, down away by Shooter’s Hill there, six or seven miles from Lunnon. He was a gentleman of spirit, and good-looking, and held his head up when he walked, and had what you may call fire about him. He wrote poetry, and he rode, and he ran, and he cricketed, and he danced, and he acted, and he done it all equally beautiful. He was uncommon proud of Master Harry as was his only child; but he didn’t spoil him, neither. He was a gentleman that had a will of his own and a eye of his own, and that would be minded. Consequently, though he made quite a companion of the fine bright boy, and was delighted to see him so fond of reading his fairy books, and was never tired of hearing him say My name is Norval, or hearing him sing his songs about Young May moon is beaming love, and When he as adores thee has left but the name, and that: still he kept the command over the child, and the child was a child, and it’s to be wished more of ’em was!

How did Boots happen to know all this? Why, through being under-gardener. Of course he couldn’t be under-gardener, and be always about, in the summertime, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry hadn’t come to him one morning early, and said, “Cobbs, how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?” and then begun cutting it in print, all over the fence.

He couldn’t say he had taken particular notice of the children before that; but, really it was pretty to see them two mites a going about the place together, deep in love. And the courage of the boy! Bless your soul, he’d have throwed off his little hat, and tucked up his little sleeves, and gone in at a lion, he would, if they had happened to meet one and she had been frightened of him. One day he stops, along with her, where Boots was hoeing weeds in the gravel, and says – speaking up,“Cobbs,” he says, “I like you.”  “Do you, sir? I’m proud to hear it.”  “Yes, I do, Cobbs. Why do I like you, do you think, Cobbs?”  “Don’t know. Master Harry, I am sure.”  “Because Norah likes you, Cobbs.”  “Indeed, sir? That’s very gratifying.”  “Gratifying, Cobbs? It’s better than millions of the brightest diamonds, to be liked by Norah.”  “Certainly, sir.”  “You’re going away, ain’t you, Cobbs?”  “Yes sir.” “Would you like another situation, Cobbs?”  “Well, sir, I shouldn’t object, if it was a good ’un.”  “Then, Cobbs,” says he, “you shall be our head gardener when we are married.” And he tucks her, in her little sky blue mantle, under his arm, and walks away.

Boots could assure me that it was better than a picter, and equal to a play, to see them babies with their long bright curling hair, their sparkling eyes, and their beautiful light tread, a rambling about the garden, deep in love. Boots was of opinion that the birds believed they was birds, and kept up with ’em, singing to please ’em. Sometimes, they would creep under the tulip-tree, and would sit there with their arms round one another’s necks, and their soft cheeks touching, a reading about the Prince, and the Dragon, and the good and bad enchanters, and the king’s fair daughter. Sometimes, he would hear them planning about having a house in the forest, keeping bees and a cow, and living entirely on milk and honey. Once, he came upon them by the pond, and heard Master Harry say, “Adorable Norah, kiss me, and say you love me, to distraction, or I’ll jump in head foremost.” And Boots made no question he would have done it, if she hadn’t complied. On the whole. Boots said it had a tendency to make him feel as if he was in love himself – only he didn’t exactly know who with.

“Cobbs,” said Master Harry, one evening, when Cobbs was watering the flowers; “I am going on a visit, this present midsummer, to my grandmamma’s at York.”

“Are you indeed, sir? I hope you’ll have a pleasant time. I am going into Yorkshire myself, when I leave here.”

“Are you going to your grandmamma’s, Cobbs?” “No, sir. I haven’t got such a thing.”

“Not as a grandmamma, Cobbs?”

“No, sir.”

The boy looked on at the watering of the flowers, for a little while, and then said, “I shall be very glad indeed to go, Cobbs – Norah’s going.”

“You’ll be all right then, sir,” says Cobbs, “with your beautiful sweetheart by your side.”

“Cobbs,” returned the boy, blushing, “I never let anybody joke about it, when I can prevent them.”

“It wasn’t a joke, sir,” says Cobbs with humility, “ – wasn’t so meant.”

“I am glad of that, Cobbs, because I like you, you know, and you’re going to live with us – Cobbs!”

“Sir.”

“What do you think my grandmamma gives me, when I go down there?”

“I couldn’t so much as guess, sir.”

“A Bank of England five-pound note, Cobbs.”

“Whew!” says Cobbs, “that’s a spanking sum of money. Master Harry.”

“A person could do a great deal with such a sum of money as that. Couldn’t a person, Cobbs?”

“I believe you, sir!”

“Cobbs,” said the boy, “I’ll tell you a secret. At Norah’s house they have been joking her about me, and pretending to laugh at our being engaged. Pretending to make game of it, Cobbs!”

“Such, sir,” says Cobbs, “is the depravity of human natur.”

The boy, looking exactly like his father, stood for a few minutes with his glowing face toward the sunset, and then departed with “Good-night, Cobbs. I’m going in.”

If I was to ask Boots how it happened that he was going to leave that place just at that present time, well, he couldn’t rightly answer me. lie did suppose he might have stayed there till now, if he had been anyways inclined. But, you see, he was younger then and wanted change. That’s what he wanted – change. Mr. Walmers, he said to him when he give him notice of his intentions to leave, “Cobbs,” he says, “have you anything to complain of? I make the inquiry, because if I find that any of my people really has anything to complain of, I wish to make it right if I can.” “No, sir,” says Cobbs; “thanking you, sir, I find myself as well situated here as I could hope to be anywheres. The truth is, sir, that I’m a going to seek my fortun.” “Oh, indeed, Cobbs?” he says; “I hope you may find it.” And Boots could assure me – which he did, touching his hair with his boot-jack, as a salute in the way of his present calling – that he hadn’t found it yet.

Well, sir! Boots left the Elmses when his time was up, and Master Harry he went down to the old lady’s at York, which old lady would have given that child the teeth out of her head (if she had had any) she was so wrapped up in him. What does that infant do – for infant you may call him and be within the mark – but cut away from that old lady’s with his Norah,on a expedition to go to Gretna Green and be married I Sir, Boots was at this identical Holly-Tree Inn (having left it several times since to better himself, but always come back through one thing or another), when, one summer afternoon, the coach drives up, and out of the coach gets them two children. The guard says to our governor, “I don’t quite make out these little passengers, but the young gentleman’s words was, that they was to be brought here.” The young gentleman gets out; hands his lady out; gives the guard something for himself; says to our governor, “We’re to stop here tonight, please. Sitting-room and two bedrooms will be required. Chops and cherry-pudding for two!” and tucks her, in her little sky blue mantle, under his arm, and walks into the house much bolder than brass.

Boots leaves me to judge what the amazement of that establishment was, when those two tiny creatures all alone by themselves was marched into the Angel; – much more so, when he, who had seen them without their seeing him, give the governor his views of the expedition they was upon. “Cobbs,” says the Governor, “if this is so, I must set off myself to York and quiet their friends’ minds. In which case you must keep your eye upon ’em, and humour ’em till I comeback. But, before I take these measures, Cobbs, I should wish you to find from themselves whether your opinions is correct.” “Sir to you,” says Cobbs, “that shall be done directly.”

So, Boots goes upstairs to the Angel, and there he finds Master Harry on an enormous sofa – immense at any time, but looking like the Great Bed of Ware, compared with him – a drying the eyes of Miss Norah with his pocket-hankecher. Their little legs was entirely off the ground, of course, and it really is not possible for Boots to express to me how small them children looked.

“It’s Cobbs! It’s Cobbs!” cries Master Harry, and comes running to him and catching hold of his hand. Miss Norah comes running to him on t’other side and catching hold of his t’other hand, and they both jump for joy.

“I see you a getting out, sir,” says Cobbs. “I thought it was you. I thought I couldn’t be mistaken in your height and figure. What’s the object of your journey, sir? – Matrimonial?”

“We are going to be married, Cobbs, at Gretna Green,” returned the boy. “We have run away on purpose. Norah has been in rather low spirits, Cobbs; but she’ll be happy, now we have found you to be our friend.”

“Thank you, sir, and thank you miss,” says Cobbs, “for your good opinion. Did you bring any luggage with you, sir?”

If I will believe Boots when he gives me his word and honour upon it, the lady had got a parasol, a smelling-bottle, a round and a half of cold buttered toast, eight peppermint drops and a hairbrush – seemingly a doll’s. The gentleman had got about half-a-dozen yards of string, a knife, three or four sheets of writing-paper folded up surprising small, an orange, and a chaney mug with his name upon it.

“What may be the exact natur of your plans, sir?” says Cobbs.

“To go on,” replied the boy – which the courage of that boy was something wonderful! – “in the morning and to be married tomorrow.”

“Just so, sir,” says Cobbs. “Would it meet your views, sir, if I was to accompany you?”

When Cobbs said this, they both jumped for joy again, and cried out, “O yes, yes, Cobbs! Yes!”

“Well, sir,” says Cobbs. “If you will excuse my having the freedom to give an opinion, what I should recommend would be this. I’m acquainted with a pony, sir, which, put in a phaeton that I could borrow, would take you and Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior (myself driving, if you approved), to the end of your journey in a very short space of time. I am not altogether sure, sir, that this pony will be at liberty tomorrow, but even, if you had to wait over tomorrow for him, it might be worth your while. As to the small account here, sir, in case you was to find yourself running at all short, that don’t signify; because I’m a part proprietor of this inn, and it could stand over.”

Boots assures me that when they clapped their hands, and jumped for joy again, and called him “Good Cobbs!” and “Dear Cobbs!” and bent across him to kiss one another in the delight of their confiding hearts, he felt himself the meanest rascal for deceiving ’em that ever was born.

“Is there anything you want just at present, sir?” says Cobbs, mortally ashamed of himself.

“We should like some cakes after dinner,” answered Master Harry, folding his arms, putting out one leg, and looking straight at him, “and two apples – and jam. With dinner we should like to have toast-and-water. But, Norah has always been accustomed to half a glass of currant wine at dessert. And so have I.”

“It shall be ordered at the bar, sir,” says Cobbs; and away he went.

Boots has the feeling as fresh upon him at this minute of speaking, as he had then, that he would far rather have had it out in half-a-dozen rounds with the governor than have combined with him; and that he wished with all his heart there was any impossible place where those two babies could make an impossible marriage, and live impossibly happy ever afterward. However, as it couldn’t be, he went into the governor’s plans, and the governor set off for York in half-an-hour.

The way in which the women of that house – without exception – every one of ’em – married and single – took to that boy when they heard the story, Boots considers surprising. It was as much as he could do to keep ’em from dashing into the room and kissing him. They climbed up all sorts of places, at the risk of their lives, to look at him through a pane of glass. They was seven deep at the keyhole. They was out of their minds about him and his bold spirit.

In the evening Boots went into the room, to see how the runaway couple was getting on. The gentleman was on the window-seat, supporting the lady in his arms. She had tears upon her face, and was lying, very tired and half asleep, with her head upon his shoulder.

“Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior fatigued, sir?” says Cobbs.

“Yes, she is tired, Cobbs; but she is not used to be away from home, and she has been in low spirits again. Cobbs, do you think you could bring a biffin, please?”

“I ask your pardon, sir,” says Cobbs. “What was it you—?”

“I think a Norfolk biffin would rouse her, Cobbs. She is very fond of them.”

Boots withdrew in search of the required restorative, and, when he brought it in, the gentleman handed it to the lady, and fed her with a spoon, and took a little himself. The lady being heavy with sleep, and rather cross, “What should you think, sir,” says Cobbs, “of a chamber candlestick?” The gentleman approved; the chambermaid went first, up the great staircase; the lady, in her sky-blue mantle, followed, gallantly escorted by the gentleman; the gentleman embraced her at her door, and retired to his own apartments, where Boots softly locked him up.

Boots couldn’t but feel with increased acuteness what a base deceiver he was, when they consulted him at breakfast (they had ordered sweet milk-and-water, and toast and currant jelly, overnight), about the pony. It really was as much as he could do, he don’t mind confessing to me, to look them two young; things in the face, and think what a wicked old father of lies he had grown up to be. Howsomever, he went on a lying like a Trojan, about the pony. He told ’em that it did so unfortunately happen that the pony was half-clipped, you see, and that ho couldn’t be taken out in that state, for fear it should strike to his inside. But that he’d be finished clipping in the course of the day, and that tomorrow morning at eight o’clock the phaeton would be ready. Boots’s view of the whole case, looking back upon it in my room, is, that Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior was beginning to give in. She hadn’t had her hair curled when she went to bed, and she didn’t seem quite up to brushing it herself, and its getting in her eyes put her out. But nothing put out Master Harry. He sat behind his breakfast cup, a tearing away at the jelly, as if he had been his own father.

After breakfast, Boots is inclined to consider that they drawed soldiers – at least, he knows that many such was found in the fireplace, all on horseback. In the course of the morning, Master Harry rang the bell – it was surprising how that there boy did carry on – and said in a sprightly way, “Cobbs, is there any good walks in this neighbourhood?”

“Yes, sir,” says Cobbs. “There’s Love Lane.”

“Get out with you, Cobbs!” – that was that there boy’s expression – “you’re joking.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” says Cobbs, “there really is Love Lane. And a pleasant walk it is, and proud shall I be to show it to yourself and Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior.”

“Norah, dear,” said Master Harry, “this is curious. We really ought to see Love Lane. Put on your bonnet, my sweetest darling, and we will go there with Cobbs.”

Boots leaves me to judge what a beast he felt himself to be, when that young pair told him, as they all three jogged along together, that they made up their minds to give him two thousand guineas a year as head gardener, on account of his being so true a friend to ’em. Boots could have wished at the moment that the earth would have opened and swallered him up; he felt so mean, with their beaming eyes a looking at him, and believing him. Well, sir, he turned the conversation as a well as he could, and he took ’em down Love Lane to the water-meadows, and there Master Harry would have drowned himself in half a moment more, a getting out a water-lily for her – but nothing daunted that boy. Well, sir, they was tired out. All being so new and strange to ’em, they was tired as tired could be. And they laid down on a bank of daisies, like the children in the wood, leastways meadow, and fell asleep.

Boots don’t know – perhaps I do – but never mind, it don’t signify either way – why it made a man fit to make a fool of himself, to see them two pretty babies a lying there in the clear, still sunny day, not dreaming half so hard when they was asleep, as they done when they awaked. But, Lord! when you come to think of yourself, you know, and what a game you have been up to ever since you was in your own cradle, and what a poor sort of a chap you are, and how it’s always either Yesterday with you, or else Tomorrow, and never today, that’s where it is!

Well, sir, they woke up at last, and then one thing was getting pretty clear to Boots, namely, that Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior’s temper was on the move. When Master Harry took her round the waist, she said he “teased her so;” and when he says, “Norah, my young May moon, your Harry tease you?” she tells him, “Yes; and I want to go home!”

A biled fowl, and baked bread-and-butter pudding, brought Mrs. Walmers up a little ; but Boots could have wished, he must privately own to me, to have seen her more sensible of the voice of love, and less abandoning of herself to currants. However, Master Harry he kept up, and his noble heart was as fond as ever. Mrs. Walmers turned very sleepy about dusk, and began to cry. Therefore, Mrs. Walmers went off to bed as per yesterday: and Master Harry ditto repeated. About eleven or twelve at night, comes back the governor in a chaise, along with Mr. Walmers and an elderly lady. Mr. Walmers looks amused and very serious, both at once, and says to our missis, “We are much indebted to you, ma’am, for your kind care of our little children, which we can never sufficiently acknowledge. Pray, ma’am, where is my boy?” Our missis says, “Cobbs has the dear child in charge, sir. Cobbs, show Forty!” Then, he says to Cobbs, “Ah, Cobbs! I am glad to see you. I understood you was here!” And Cobbs says, “Yes, sir. Your most obedient, sir.”

I may be surprised to hear Boots say it, perhaps; but. Boots assures me that his heart beat like a hammer, going upstairs. “I beg your pardon, sir,” says he, while unlocking the door; “I hope you are not angry with Master Harry. For, Master Harry is a fine boy, sir, and will do you credit and honour.” And Boots signifies to me, that if the fine boy’s father had contradicted him in the daring state of mind in which he then was, he thinks he should have “fetched him a crack,” and taken the consequences.

But, Mr. Walmers only says, “No, Cobbs. No, my good fellow. Thank you!” And the door being open, goes in.

Boots goes in too, holding the light, and he sees Mr. Walmers go up to the bedside, bend gently down, and kiss the sleeping face. Then, he stands looking at it for a minute, looking wonderfully like it (they do say he ran away with Mrs. Walmers); and then he gently shakes the little shoulder.

“Harry, my dear boy! Harry!”

Master Harry starts up and looks at him. Looks at Cobbs too. Such is the honour of that mite, that he looks at Cobbs, to see whether he has brought him into trouble. “I am not angry, my child. I only want you to dress yourself and come home.”

“Yes, pa.”

Master Harry dresses himself quickly. His breast begins to swell when he has nearly finished, and it swells more and more as he stands at last, a looking at his father; his father standing a looking at him, the quiet image of him.

“Please may I” – the spirit of that little creature, and the way he kept his rising tears down! – “Please, dear pa – may I – kiss Norah, before I go?”

“You may, my child.”

So, he takes Master Harry in his hand, and Boots leads the way with the candle, and they come to that other bedroom: where the elderly lady is seated by the bed, and poor little Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior is fast asleep. There, the father lifts the child up to the pillow, and he lays his little face down for an instant by the little warm face of poor unconscious little Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior, and gently draws it to him – a sight so touching to the chambermaids who are peeping through the door that one of them calls out “It’s a shame to part ’em!” But this chambermaid was always, as Boots informs me, a soft-hearted one. Not that there was any harm in that gill. Far from it.

Finally, Boots says, that’s all about it. Mr. Walmers drove away in the chaise, having hold of Master Harry’s hand. The elderly lady and Mrs. Harry Walmers Junior that was never to be (she married a captain, long afterward, and died in India) went off the next day. In conclusion, Boots puts it to me whether I hold with him in two opinions: firstly, that there are not many couples on their way to be married, who are half as innocent of guile as those two children; secondly, that it would be a jolly good thing for a great many couples on their way to be married, if they could only be stopped in time and brought back separately.

•   •   •   •   •

THE LANDLORD

Uriah Tattenhall is my elder brother by fifteen years. I am Sam Tattenhall.

My brother Uriah rang at his gate at his snug retreat of Trumpington Cottage, Peckham, near London, exactly at a quarter to six – his regular hour – when the omnibus from the city set him down at the end of the lane. It was December, but the weather was fine and frosty, and as it was within a few days of Christmas, his children – four in number – two boys, just come home from school, and two girls who came home from school every day – were all on the alert to receive him with a world of schemes for the delectation of the coming holiday-time.

My brother Uriah was an especial family-man. He made himself the companion and playfellow of his children on all occasions that his devotion to his business in the city would admit of. His hearty, cheery voice was heard as he entered the hall, and while he was busy pulling off his overcoat, and hanging up his hat: “Well, my boys, well, George, well, Miss Lucy, there. What are you all about? How’s the world used you since this morning? Where’s mamma? The kettle boiling, eh?” The running fire of hilarity that always animated him seemed to throw sunshine and a new life into the house, when he came in. The children this evening rushed out into the hall, and crowded round him with such a number of “I say, pa’s,” and “Do you know, pa?” and “Don’t tell him now, Mary, – let him guess. Oh! you’ll never guess, pa!” that he could only hurry them all into the sitting-room before him, like a little flock of sheep, saying, “Well, well, you rogues, – well, well, – let us have some tea, and then all about it.”

The fire blazed bonnily, as it was wont, in the bright grate, and that and the candles made the room, with light and warmth, the very paradise of comfort. Mrs. Tattenhall, a handsome woman of five and thirty or so – she might be more, but she did not look it – was just in the act of pouring the water from a very bright little kettle into the equally bright silver tea-pot, and with a sunny, rosy, youthful, and yet matronly face, turned smilingly at his entrance, and said, “Well, my dear, is it not a very cold night?”

“Not in this room, certainly, my dear,” said my brother Uriah, “and with such a snuggery before one who cares for cold outside?”

Mrs. Tattenhall gave him a brighter smile still, and the neat Harriet coming in with the toast, the whole family group was speedily seated round the tea-table, and the whole flood of anticipated pleasures and plans of the younger population let loose, and cordially entered into, and widened and improved by my brother Uriah. He promised them an early night at the very best pantomime and they were to read all about all the pantomimes in the newspapers, and find out which was the best. He meant to take them to see all sorts of sights, and right off-hand on Christmas Eve he was going to set up a Christmas-tree, and have Christ-kindchen, and all sorts of gifts under it for everybody. He had got it already done by a German who came often to his warehouse, and it was somewhere, not far off just now.

“Thank you, papa, – thank you a thousand times. Oh! what heaps of fun!” exclaimed the children, altogether.

“Why, really, my dear,” said Mrs. Tattenhall, delighted as the children, “what has come to you? You quite out-do yourself, good as you always are. You are quite magnificent in your projects.”

“To be sure,” said Uriah, taking hold of the hands of little Lucy, and dancing round the room with her. “To be sure; we may just as well be merry as sad; it will be all the same a hundred years hence.”

Presently the tea-table was cleared, and, as they drew round the fire, my brother Uriah pulled out a book, and said, “George, there’s a nice book – begin and read it aloud; it will be a very pleasant book for these winter evenings, before all the dissipation begins. It is Pringle’s Adventures in South Africa, and is almost as good as Robinson Crusoe. I knew Pringle well: a lame, little man, that you never would dream could sit on a horse, much less ride after lions and elephants in that style.”

“Lions and elephants!” all were silent, and George read on. He read until eight o’clock, their bedtime, and the whole group – parents and children – were equally delighted with it. As they closed the book – “Now,” said the father, “would it not be grand fun to live out there, and ride after the lions and elephants?”

“Ah! grand fun!” said the boys, but the mother and the girls shuddered at the lions. “Well, you could stay in the house, you know,” said Bob.

“Right, my tine fellow,” said the father, clapping him on the shoulder. “So now off to bed, and dream all about it.”

When the children were gone, my brother Uriah stretched out his feet on the fender and fell into a silence. When my brother’s silence had lasted some time, his wife said, “Are you sleepy, my dear?”

“No; never was more wakeful,” said Uriah; “really, my dear, I never was less inclined to be sprightly; but it won’t do to clash the spirits of the children. Let them enjoy the Christmas as much as they can: they will never be young but once.”

“What is amiss ?” asked Mrs. Tattenhall, with a quick, apprehensive look. “Is there something amiss? Good gracious! you frighten me.”

“Why no, there is nothing exactly amiss! there is nothing new; but the fact is, I have just taken stock, and today finished casting all up and struck the balance.”

“And is it bad? Is it less than you expected?” asked .Mrs. Tattenhall, fixing her eyes seriously on her husband’s face.

“Bad? No, not bad nor good. I’ll tell you what it is. You’ve heard of a toad in a mud wall. Well that’s me. Twenty years ago, I went into business with exactly three thousand pounds, and here I have been trading, and fagging, and caring, and getting, and losing – business extending, and profits getting less and less – making large sales, and men breaking directly after, and so the upshot is, – twenty years’ trade, and the balance the same to a pound as that I began with. Three thousand I started with, and three thousand is precisely my capital at this moment.”

“Is that all?” said Mrs. Tattenhall, wonderfully relieved. “Be thankful, my dear Uriah, that you have three thousand pounds. You have your health wonderfully: we have all our health; we have children, as good and promising children as anybody is blessed with, and a happy home, and live as well and comfortably as anyone need to do, or as I wish, I am sure. What do we want more?”

“What do we want more?” said Uriah, drawing up his legs suddenly, and clapping his hands in a positive sort of a way on his knees. “Why, I for one, want a great deal more. We’ve children, you say, and a home, and all that. Heaven be thanked, so we have! but I want our children to have a home after us. Three thousand pounds divided amongst four, leaves about seven hundred and fifty each. Is it worth while to fag a whole life, and leave them that and a like prospect? No,” continued Uriah, in a considering manner, and shaking his head. “No, I want something more; more for myself; more for them; more room; more scope, a wider horizon, and a more proportionate result of a whole human existence. And do you know, Maria, what I have come to as the best conclusion? To go out to Australia.”

“To go out to Australia!” said Mrs. Tattenhall, in astonishment. “My dear Uriah, you are joking. You mean no such thing.”

“But that is just what I do mean,” said Uriah, taking his wife’s hand affectionately; “I have thought of it long, and the toad-in-the-wall balance has determined me. And now what I ask of you is to look at it calmly and earnestly. You know the Smiths, the Browns, and the Robinsons have gone out. They report the climate delicious, and that wonders are doing. A new country, if it be a good country, is the place to grow and thrive in, without doubt. Look at the trees in a wood. They grow up and look very fine in the mass. The wood, you say, is a very fine wood; but when you have looked at the individual trees, they are crowded and spindled up. They cannot put out a single bough beyond a certain distance; if they attempt it, their presuming twigs are poked back again by sturdy neighbours all round, that are all struggling for light and space like them. Look, then, at the tree on the open plain, – how it spreads and hangs in grand amplitude its unobstructed boughs and. foliage; a lordly object. Just so, this London. It is avast, a glorious, a most imposing London, but thousands of its individuals in it are pressed and circumscribed to a few square yards and no more. Give me the open plain, – the new country, and then see if I do not put out a better head, and our children too.”

Mrs. Tattenhall, now she felt that her husband was in earnest, sat motionless and confounded. The shock had come too suddenly upon her. Her husband, it is true, had often told her that things did not move as he wished; that they seemed fixed, and stereotyped, and stagnant; but then, when are merchants satisfied? She never had entertained an idea but that they should go on to the end of the chapter as they had been going on ever since she was married. She was bound up heart and soul with her own country ; she had her many friends and relations, with whom she lived on the most cordial terms; all her tastes, feelings, and ideas were English and metropolitan. At the very idea of quitting England, and for so new and distant a country, she was seized with an indescribable consternation.

“My dear Maria,” said her husband; “mind, I don’t ask you to go at first. You and the children can remain here till I have been and seen what the place and prospects are like. My brother Sam will look after business – he will soon be at home in it – and if all is pleasant, why, you will come then, if not I won’t ask you. I’ll work out a good round sum myself, if possible, or open up some connection that will mend matters here. What can I say more?”

“Nothing, dear Uriah, nothing. But those poor children—”

“Those poor children!” said Uriah. “Why, my dear Maria, if you were to ask them whether they would like a voyage to Australia, to go and see those evergreen woods, and gallop about all amongst gay parrots, and great kangaroos, they would jump off their seats with joy. The spirits of the young are ever on the wing for adventure and new countries. It is the prompting of that Great Power which has constructed all this marvellous universe, and bade mankind multiply and replenish the earth. Don’t trouble yourself about them. You saw how they devoured the adventures at the Cape, and you’ll see how they will kindle up in a wonderful enthusiasm at the promise of a voyage to Australia. What are pantomimes to that?”

“Poor things!” said Mrs. Tattenhall. “They know nothing about the reality ; all is fairyland and poetry to them.”

“The reality! the reality, Maria, will be all fairyland and poetry to them.”

Mrs. Tattenhall shook her head, and retired that night – not to sleep, but with a very sad heart to ruminate over this unexpected revelation. My brother’s words were realized at the first mention of the project to the children. After the first shock of surprise and doubt whether it were really meant, they became unboundedly delighted. The end of it was, that by the middle of February, my brother Uriah, having had a handsome offer for his business and stock, had wound up all his affairs; and Mrs. Tattenhall having concluded, like a good wife and mother, to go with the whole family, they bade farewell to England, Mrs. Tattenhall with many tears, Uriah serious and thoughtful, the children full of delight and wonder at everything in the ship.

They had a fine voyage, though with very few passengers, for the captain said there was a temporary damp on the Australian colonies. The order of the Government at home to raise the upset price of land to one pound per acre, had checked emigration, and as there had been a good deal of speculation in Melbourne in town allotments, things just now looked gloomy. This was in eighteen hundred and forty-three. “But it can’t last long,” said the captain, “that silly order of raising the price of the land is so palpably absurd; while America is selling land so much nearer at a quarter of the price, that it must be repealed; and then all will be right again.”

It was the middle of May when our party arrived in Hobson’s Bay. It was very rainy, gloomy weather – the very opposite to all that the climate had been represented in the accounts sent home – but then it was the commencement of winter, the November of our season. Uriah got a boat, and sailed up the winding river to the town. The sail was through a flat tract of land densely overgrown with a mass of close, dark bushes, of some ten feet high, somewhat resembling our sloe-tree, the tea-tree of that country. On reaching the foot of the town, which stood on a range of low hills, Uriah and his companions stepped out into a most appalling slough of black mud, through which they waded till they reached the town, which was of no great extent, scattered over a considerable space, however, for the number of houses, and with great intervals of woodland and of places where the trees had been felled, and where the stumps, a yard high, remained in unsightly nakedness.

Uriah walked on through a scene which, somehow in keeping with the weather, fell heavily on his spirits. There was nothing doing, or stirring; houses in various degrees of progress stood as they were. There were piles of timber, lime, shingles, posts, and rails, empty wagons and carts, but no people employed about them. On every hand he saw lots marked out for fencing or building upon, but there they remained all stationary.

“Is it Sunday?” Uriah asked himself. No, it was Tuesday. Then why all this stagnation; this solitude? In a lane, or rather deep track of mud and ruts, since known as Flinders’ Lane, but then without a name, and only just wide enough between the trees for a cart to pass, Uriah wading and plunging along, the rain meantime pouring, streaming, and drumming down on his umbrella, he came face to face with a large, active man in a mackintosh cloak, and an oilskin hood over his head. Neither of them found it very convenient to step out of the middle mud track, because on each side of it rose a perfect bank of sludge raised by the wheels of drays, and stopping to have a look at each other, the strange man suddenly put out a huge red hand warm and wet, and exclaimed:

“What! Tattenhall! You here! In the name of all wonders what could bring you here at this moment?”

“What, Robinson! is that you?” cried Uriah. “Is this your climate? This your paradise?”

“Climate – paradise – be hanged!” exclaimed Robinson. “They’re well enough. If everything else were as well there would be naught to complain of. But tell me, Uriah Tattenhall, with that comfortable Trumpington Cottage at Peckham, with that well-to-do warehouse in the Old Jewry, what could possess you to come here?”

“What should I come for, but to settle?” asked Uriah, somewhat chagrined at this salutation.

“To settle! ha, ha!” burst out Robinson. “Well, as for that, you could not come to a better place. It is a regular settler here. Everything and everybody are settled here out and out. This is a settlement and no mistake; but it is like many other settlements, the figures are all on the wrong side of the ledger.”

“Good gracious!” said Uriah.

“Nay, it is neither good nor gracious,” replied Robinson. “Look round! What do you see? Ruin, desertion, dirt and the – devil!”

“Why, how is that?” asked Uriah. “I thought you, and Jones, and Brown, and all of you had made your fortunes.”

“So we had, or were just on the point of doing. We had purchased lots of land for building, and had sold it out again at five hundred per cent., when chop! down comes little Lord John with his pound an acre, and heigh, presto! everything goes topsy turvy. Our purchasers are either in the bankruptcy court, or have vanished. By jingo! I could show you such lots, fine lots for houses and gardens, for shops and warehouses; ay, and shops and warehouses upon them too, as would astonish you.”

“Well, and what then?” asked Uriah.

“What then! why, man, don’t you comprehend? Emigration is stopped, broken off as short as a pipe-shank; not a soul is coming out to buy and live in all these houses – not a soul except an odd – excuse me, Tattenhall, I was going to say, except you and another fool or two. But where do you hang out? Look! there is my house,” pointing to a wooden erection near. “I’ll come and see you as soon as I know where you fix yourself.”

“But mind one thing,” cried Uriah, seizing him by the arm as he passed. “For heaven’s sake, don’t talk in this manner to my wife. It would kill her.”

“Oh no, mum’s the word! There’s no use frightening the women,” said Robinson. “No, confound it, I won’t croak anyhow. And, after all, bad as things are, why they can’t remain so forever. Nothing ever does that’s one comfort. They’ll mend sometime.”

“When?” said Uriah.

“Well,” said Robinson, pausing a little, “not before you and I meet again, so I may leave that answer to another opportunity;” and with a nod and very knowing look he stalked on.

“Odd fellow!” said my brother Uriah. “He is very jocose for a ruined man. What is one to think?” and he waded on. After making a considerable circuit, and actually losing himself in the wood somewhere about where the Reverend Mr. Morrison’s chapel now stands in Collins Street, he again came across Robinson who stood at the door of a considerable erection of wattle-and-daub, that is, a building of boughs wattled on stakes, and dabbed over with mud; then not uncommon in Melbourne, and still common enough in the bush. It stood on the hillside with a swift muddy torrent produced by the rains rushing down the valley below it, toward the river, as it has often done since it bore the name of Swanston Street.

“Here, Tattenhall! here is a pretty go!” shouted Robinson; “a fellow has cut with bag and baggage tonight who owes me four thousand pounds, and has left me a lot more houses and land. That’s the way every day. But look, here is a house ready for you. You can’t have a better, and you can pay me any trifle you like – something is better than nothing.”

He led Uriah in. The house was thoroughly and comfortably furnished; though, of course, very simply, with beds and everything. Uriah, in less than a week, was safely established there, and had time to ramble about with his boys, and learn more fully the condition of the colony. It was melancholy beyond description. Wild, reckless speculation brought to a sudden close by the cessation of immigration, had gone like a hurricane over the place, and had left nothing but ruin and paralysis behind it. No words that Robinson had used, or that any man could use, could overpaint the real condition of prostration and of misery. Two hundred and eighty insolvencies in a population of ten thousand, told the tale of awful reality. Uriah was overwhelmed with consternation at the step he had taken. Oh! how pleasant seemed that Trumpington Cottage, Peckham, and that comfortable warehouse in the old Jewry, as he viewed them from the Antipodes in the midst of rain and ruin.

What, however, was my brother Uriah’s astonishment to see Robinson stalk in the next day, his tall figure having to stoop at every door, and in his brusque, noisy way go up to Mrs. Tattenhall, and shaking her hand as you would shake the handle of a pump, congratulate her on her arrival in the colony.

“A lucky hit, madam, a most lucky, scientific hit! Ah! trust Tattenhall for knowing what he is about.”

Mrs. Tattenhall stood with a singular expression of wonder and bewilderment on her countenance, for the condition of the place, and the condolings of several female neighbours who had dropped in in Uriah’s absence, had induced her to believe that they had made a fatal move of it.

“Why, sir,” said she, “what can you mean, for, as I hear, the place is utterly ruined, and certainly it looks like it?”

“Ruined! to be sure it is, at least the people are, more’s the pity for me, and the like of me who have lost everything; but for Tattenhall, who has everything to gain, and money to win it with, why it is the golden opportunity, the very thing! If he had watched at all the four corners of the world, and for a hundred years, he could not have dropped into such a chance. Ah! trust Tattenhall, make me believe he did not plan it.” Thrusting his knuckles into Uriah’s side, and laughing with a thunderclap of a laugh that seemed to come from lungs of leather.

“Why, look here now,” he continued, drawing a chair and seating himself on its front edge; “look here now, if you had come six months ago, you could have bought nothing except out of the fire. Town allotments, land, houses, bread, meat, sugar, everything ten times the natural price: and, now! cheap, dog cheap! of no value at all, you might have them for asking for; nay, I could go into a dozen deserted shops, and take any quantity for nothing. And property! why three thousand pounds cash would almost buy all the place – all the colony.”

“What is the use,” asked Mrs. Tattenhall, “of buying a ruined colony?”

“A ruined colony!” said Robinson, edging himself still more forward in his chair, and seeming actually to sit upon nothing, his huge figure and large ruddy face appearing still larger. “The colony, madam, is not ruined; never was ruined, never can be ruined. The people are ruined, a good lot of them; but the colony is a good and grand colony. God made the colony, and let me tell you, madam ,” looking very serious, “Providence is no speculator, up today, down tomorrow. What he does he does. Well, the people have ruined themselves; but it is out of their power to ruin the colony; no, nor the town. The town and the colony are sound as a bell, never were sounder, never had more stuff in the; never had so much. There is the land still, not a yard of it is gone ; no great fellow has put that on his back and gone off with it. The land is there, and the houses, and the merchandise, and the flocks, and herds, and horses; and – what concerns you—”

He sat and looked at Mrs. Tattenhall, who stood there intently listening, and Uriah stood just behind her listening too, and all the children with their mouths open, gazing on the strange man.

“Well, what – what concerns us?” said Mrs. Tattenhall.

“To get a huge, almighty heap of something for nothing,” said the large man, stretching out his arms in a circular shape, as if he would enclose a whole globe, and in a low, slow, deep tone, calculated to sink deep into the imaginations of the listeners.

“If we did but know when things would mend;” said my brother Uriah, for the first time venturing to put in a word.

“When!” said Robinson, starting up so suddenly that his head struck against a beam in the low, one-storied house. “Confound these low places,” said he, turning fiery red, and rubbing his crown, “there will be better anon. When? say ye? Hark ye? this colony is – how old? Eight years! and in eight years what a town! what wealth! what buildings ! what a power of sheep and cattle! The place is knocked down, won’t it get up again? Ay, and quickly! Here are a pair of sturdy legs,” he said, turning to Bob, who flushed up in surprise; “but, Mrs. Tattenhall, you did not teach him to walk without a few tumbles, eh? But he got up again, and how he stands now! what a sturdy young rogue it is! And what made him get up again? Because he was young and strong, and the colony is young and strong, madam. Eight years old! What shall I give you for a three thousand pound purchase made now, three years hence? Just think of that,” said the tall man, “just turn that over a time or two,” nodding solemnly to my brother, and then my sister-in-law, and then cautiously glancing at the menacing beam, and with a low duck, diving out of the house.

“What a strange fellow!” said Uriah. “But how true!” said Mrs. Tattenhall.

“How true! What true?” asked Uriah, astonished.

“Why,” said Mrs. Tattenhall, “what he says. It is truth, Uriah; we must buy as much as we can.”

“But,” said Uriah, “only the other day he said the clean contrary. He said everybody was ruined.”

“And he says so still,” added Mrs. Tattenhall, enthusiastically, “but not the colony. We must buy! We must buy, and wait. One day we shall reap a grand harvest.”

“Ah!” said Uriah: “so you let yourself, my dear Maria, be thus easily persuaded, because Robinson wants to sell, and thinks we have money?”

“Is it not common sense, however? Is it not the plainest sense?” asked Mrs. Tattenhall. “Do you think this colony is never to recover?”

“Never is a long while,” said Uriah. “But still—”

“Well, we will think it over, and see how the town lies and where the chief point of it will be, probably, hereafter; and if this Mr. Robinson has any land in such places, I would buy of him, because he has given us the first idea of it.”

They thought and looked, and the end of it was, that very soon they had bought up land and houses, chiefly from Robinson, to the amount of two thousand pounds. Robinson fain would not have sold, but have mortgaged; and that fact was the most convincing proof that he was sincere in his expectations of a revival. Time went on. Things were more and more hopeless. Uriah, who had nothing else to do, set on and cultivated a garden. He had plenty of garden ground, and his boys helped him, and enjoyed it vastly. As the summer went on, and melons grew ripe, and there were plenty of green peas and vegetables, by the addition of meat, which was now only one penny a pound, they could live almost for nothing; and Uriah thought they could wait and maintain themselves for years, if necessary. So from time to time, one tale of urgent staring distress or another lured him on to take fresh bargains, till he saw himself almost penniless. Things still remained as dead as the very stones or the stumps around them. My brother Uriah began to feel very melancholy; and Mrs. Tattenhall, who had so strongly advised the wholesale purchase of property, looked very serious. Uriah often thought: “Ah! she would do it; but – bless her! I will never say so, for she did it for the best.” But his boys and girls were growing apace, and made him think. “Bless me! In a few years they will be shooting up into men and women; and if this speculation should turn out all moonshine! – if the place should never revive!”

He sat one day on the stump of a tree on high ground, looking over the bay. His mind was in the most gloomy, dejected condition. Everything looked dark and hopeless. No evidence of returning life around; no spring in the commercial world; and his good money gone; as he sat thus, his eyes fixed on the distance, his mind sunk in the lowering present, a man came up, and asked him to take his land off his hands : to take it, for Heaven’s sake, and save his starving family.

“Man!” said Uriah, with a face and a voice so savage that it made the suppliant start even in his misery, “I have no money! I want no land! I have too much land. You shall have it all for as much as will carry me back to England, and set me down a beggar there!”

The man shook his head. “If I had a single crown I would not ask you : but my wife is down of the fever, and my children are dying of dysentery. What shall I do? and my lots are the very best in the place.”

“I tell you!” said my brother Uriah, with a fierce growl, and an angry flash of the eye, “I have no money, and how can I buy?” He glanced at the man in fury; but a face so full of patient suffering and of sickness – sickness of the heart, of the soul, and, as it were of famine, met his gaze, that he stopped short, felt a pang of remorse for his anger, and pointing to a number of bullocks gazing in the valley below, he said, in a softened tone, “Look there! The other day a man told me such a tale of horror – a sick family, and a jail staring him in the face, that I gave him my last money – my carefully hoarded money, and of what use are those cattle to me? None whatever. You may have them for your land, if you like. I have nothing else.”

“I will have them,” said the man. “On a distant station I know where I could sell them, if I could only leave my family. But they have no flour, no tea, nothing but meat, meat, meat.”

“Leave them to me,” said Uriah, feeling the warm blood and the spirit of humanity beginning to circulate in his bosom at the sense of what was really suffering around him. “Leave them to me. I will care for them. Your wife and children shall have a doctor. I will find you some provisions for your journey, and if ever your land is worth anything, you shall have it again. This state of things makes monsters of us. It turns our blood into gall, our hearts into stones. We must resist it or we are ruined, indeed!”

“Nay,” said the man, “I won’t impose upon you. Take that piece of land in the valley there; it will one day be valuable.”

“That?” said Uriah, looking. “That! Why, that is a swamp! I will take that – I shall not hurt you there!” And he laughed outright, the first time for two years.

Years went on, and my brother Uriah lived on, but as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. It was a melancholy and dispiriting time. The buoyancy of his soul was gone. That jovial, sunny, ebullient spirit with which he used to come home from the city in England, had fled, as a thing that had never been. He maintained himself chiefly out of his garden. His children were springing up into long lanky lads and lasses. He educated them himself, as well as he could; and as for clothes! Not a navvy – not a beggar – in the streets of London, but could have stood a comparison with them, to their infinite disparagement. Ah! those good three thousands pounds! How will the balance stand in my brother Uriah’s books at the end of the next twenty years!

But anon there woke a slight motion in the atmosphere of life. It was a mere flutter of the air, that died out again. Then again it revived – it strengthened – it blew like a breath of life over the whole landscape. Uriah looked around him from the very place where he had sat on the stump in despair. It was bright and sunny. He heard a sound of an axe and a hammer. He looked, and saw a house, that had stood a mere skeleton, once more in progress. There were people passing to and for with a more active air. What is that? A cart of goods! A dray of building materials. There was life and motion again! The discovery of converting sheep and oxen into tallow had raised the value of stock. The shops and the merchants were once more in action. The man to whom he had sold the oxen came up smiling—

“Things mend, sir. We shall soon be all right. And that piece of land in the swamp, that you were so merry over, will you sell it? It lies near the wharves and is wanted for warehouses.”

“Bravo!” cried Uriah, and they descended the hill together. Part of the land was sold; and soon substantial warehouses, of the native trapstone, were rising upon it. Uriah’s old attachment to a merchant’s life came over him. With the purchase-money he built a warehouse too. Labour was extremely low, and he built a large and commodious one.

Another year or two, and behold Uriah busy in his warehouse: his two boys clerking it gravely in the counting-house. Things grew rapidly better. Uriah and his family were once more handsomely clad, handsomely housed, and Uriah’s Jolly humour was again in the ascendant. Every now and then Robinson came hurrying in, and moreover, mayor; and saying, “Well, Mrs. Tattenhall.. didn’t I say it, eh? Is not this boy a colony on a fine sturdy pair of legs again? Not down? Not dead? Well, well, Tattenhall did me a kindness, then – by ready cash for my land – I don’t forget it; but I don’t know how I am to make him amends, unless I come and dine with him someday.” And he was off again.

Another year or two, and that wonderful crisis, the gold discovery, came. Then, what a sensation – what a stir – what a revolution! what running, and buying and bidding for land, for prime business situations? – What rolling in of people – capital – goods. Heaven and earth! what a scene – what a place – what a people.

•   •   •

Ten years to a day from the last balance at the old Jewry, Uriah Tattenhall balanced again, and his three thousand pounds were grown to seventy thousand pounds, and were still rolling up and on like a snowball.

There were George and Bob grown into really tall and handsome fellows. George was an able merchant. Bob had got a station out at the Dundenough-hills, and told wonderful stories of riding after kangaroos, and wild bulls, and shooting splendid lyre-birds – all of which came of reading Pringle’s Life in South Africa. There were Mary and Lucy, two handsome girls as any in the colony, and wonderfully attractive to a young Benson and a younger Robinson. Wonders were the next year to bring forth and amongst them was to be a grand picnic at Bob’s station, Dudenong, in which they were to live out in real tents in the forest, and cook, and bake, and brew, and the ladies were to join in a bull hunt, and shoot with revolvers, and nobody was to be hurt, or thrown, or anything to happen, but all sorts of merriment and wildwood life.

And really my brother’s villa on the Yarra River is a very fine place. The house is an Italian villa, built of real stone, ample, with large, airy rooms, a broad veranda, and all in the purest taste. It stands on a high bank above the valley, in which the Yarra winds, taking a sweep there, its course marked by a dense body of acacia trees. In the spring these trees are of resplendent gold, loading the air with their perfume, now they were thick and dark in their foliage, casting their shade on the river deep between its banks. From the house the view presented this deep valley with this curving track of trees, and beyond slopes divided into little farms, with their little homesteads upon them, where Uriah had a number of tenants making their fortunes on some thirty or forty acres each, by hay at forty pounds a ton, and potatoes and onion at one shilling a pound, and all other produce in proportion.

On this side of the river you saw extensive gardens in the hollow, blooming with roses and many tropical flowers, and along the hillsides on other hand vineyards and fruit orchards of the most vigorous vegetation, and loaded with young fruit. The party assembled at my brother Uriah’s house on that hospitable Christmas day, descended amid a native shrubbery, and Uriah thrust a walking-stick to its very handle into the rich black soil, and when his friends expressed their surprise, he told them that the soil there was fourteen feet deep, and would grow any quantity of produce for ages without manuring. Indeed, they passed through green corn of the most luxuriant character, and, crossing the bridge of a brook which there fell into the river, they found themselves under the acacias; by the river side there lay huge prostrate trunks of ancient gum trees, the patriarchs of the forest, which had fallen and given place to the acacia, and now reminded the spectators that they were still in the land of primitive woods.

“Why, Tattenhall,” said Robinson to my brother Uriah, “Trumpington Cottage, my dear fellow, would cut a poor figure after this. I’d ask any lord or gentleman to show me a fertiler or more desirable place in the tight little island. Bigger houses they may be, and are, but not to my mind more desirable. Do you know, very large houses always seem to me a sort of asylums for supernumerary servants – the master can only occupy a corner there – he cuts out quite small in the bulk. And as to fertility, this beats Battersea Fields and Fulham hollow. Those market-gardeners might plant and plant to all eternity, always taking out and never putting in, and if they could grow peaches, apricots, grapes, figs, twice a year, and all that is fine in the open air as they do in hot-houses, and sell their bunches of parsley at sixpence apiece, and watermelons – gathered from any gravel heap or dry open field – at five shillings apiece, plentiful as pumpkins, wouldn’t they astonish themselves?

“But what makes you call this place Bowstead?” continued Robinson, breaking off a small wattle-bough to whisk the flies from his face. “Or has named his Abbotsford – that’s because he’s a Scotchman: and we’ve got Cremorne Gardens, and Richmond, and Hawthorne, and all sorts of English names about here; – but Bowstead! I can’t make it out.”

“You can’t?” said Uriah, smiling; “don’t you see that the river curves in a bow here, and stead is a place?”

“Oh! that’s it,” said Robinson; “I fancied it was to remind you of Bow Bells.”

“There you have it,” said Bob, laughing. “Bow Bells! but as there was a bow and no bells, my father put a stead to it, that’s instead of the bells, you know.”

“Bless me!” said Robinson: “now I should never have thought of that – how very clever!”

And he took the joke in such perfect simplicity, that all burst into a simultaneous laugh; for every one else knew that it was so called in honour of Maria Bowstead, now the universally respected Mrs. Tattenhall.

The whole party were very merry, for they had good cause to be. Mr. and Mrs. Tattenhall, still in their prime, spread out, enlarged every way, in body and estate, rosy, handsomely dressed, saw around them nothing but prosperity. A paradise of their own, in which they saw their children already developed into that manly and feminine beauty so conspicuous in our kindred of the south; their children already taking root in the land and twining their branches among those of other opulent families, they felt the full truth of Robinson’s rude salutation, as he exclaimed, on coming to a fresh and more striking view of the house and grounds—

“Ah! Tattenhall, Tattenhall!” giving him one of his jocose pokes in the side, “didn’t I say you knew very well what you were about when you came here, eh? Mrs. Tattenliall, ma’am? Who said it? Robinson, wasn’t it, eh?”

When they returned to the house, and had taken tea in a large tent on the lawn, and the young people had played a lively game of romps or bo-peep among the bushes of the shrubbery, with much laughter, the great drawing-room was lighted up, and very soon there were heard the sounds of violins and dancing feet. My brother Uriah and his wife were at that moment sitting under the veranda, enjoying the fresh evening air, the scent of tropical trees and flowers which stole silently through the twilight, and the clear, deep blue of the sky, where the magnificent constellations of Orion and the Scorpion were growing momentarily into their full nocturnal splendour. As the music broke out my brother Uriah affectionately pressed the hand of his wife, faithful and wise and encouraging through the times of their difficulty and depression, and saying “Thank God for all this!” the pressure was as affectionately and gratefully returned. Then my brother and his wife rose up, and passed into the blaze of light which surrounded the gay and youthful company within.

•   •   •   •   •

THE BAR-MAID

She was a pretty, gentle girl – a farmer’s orphan daughter, and the landlord’s niece – whom I strongly suspected of being engaged to be married very shortly, to the writer of the letter that I saw her reading at least twenty times, when I passed the bar, and which I more than believe I saw her kiss one night. She told me a tale of that country which went so pleasantly to the music of her voice, that I ought rather to say it turned itself into verse, than was turned into verse by me.

A little past the village

The inn stood, low and white,

Green shady trees behind it,

And an orchard on the right,

Where, over the green paling

The red-cheeked apples hung,

As if to watch how wearily

The sign-board creaked and swung.

The heavy-laden branches

Over the road hung low,

Reflecting fruit or blossom

In the wayside well below;

Where children, drawing water,

Looked up and paused to see,

Amid the apple branches

A purple Judas Tree.

The road stretch’d winding onward

For many a weary mile—

So dusty footsore wanderers

Would pause and rest awhile;

And panting horses halted,

And travellers loved to tell

The quiet of the wayside inn.

The orchard, and the well.

Here Maurice dwelt; and often

The sunburned boy would stand

Gazing upon the distance.

And shading with his hand

His eyes, while watching vainly

For travellers, who might need

His aid to loose the bridle,

And tend the weary steed.

And once (the boy remember’d

That morning many a day—

The dew lay on the hawthorn,

The bird sang on the spray)

A train of horsemen, nobler

Than he had seen before,

Up from the distance gallop’d,

And paused before the door.

Upon the milk-white pony,

Fit for a fairy queen,

Was the loveliest little damsel

His eyes had ever seen;

A servant-man was holding

The leading rein, to guide

The pony and its mistress

Who cantered by his side.

Her sunny ringlets round her

A golden cloud had made,

While her large hat was keeping

Her calm blue eyes in shade;

One hand held firm the silken reins

To keep her steed in check,

The other pulled his tangled mane,

Or stroked his glossy neck.

And as the boy brought water,

And loosed the rein, he heard

The sweetest voice, that thanked him

In one low, gentle word;

She turned her blue eyes from him,

Look’d up and smiled to see

The hanging purple blossoms

Upon the Judas Tree.

And show’d it with a gesture,

Half pleading, half command,

Till he broke the fairest blossom,

And laid it in her hand;

And she tied it to her saddle,

With a ribbon from her hair,

While her happy laugh rang gaily,

Like silver on the air.

But the champing steeds were rested—

The horsemen now spurr’d on,

And down the dusty highway

They vanished and were gone.

Years pass’d, and many a traveller

Paused at the old inn-door.

But the little milk-white pony

And the child return’d no more.

Years passed, the apple branches

A deeper shadow shed;

And many a time the Judas Tree,

Blossom and leaf lay dead;

When on the loitering western breeze

Came the bells’ merry sound,

And flowery arches rose, and flags

And banners waved around,

And Maurice stood expectant,

The bridal train would stay

Some moments at the inn-door,

The eager watchers say;

They come – the cloud of dust draws near—

Mid all the state and pride.

He only sees the golden hair

And blue eyes of the bride.

The same, yet, ah! still fairer.

He knew the face once more

That bent above the pony’s neck

Years past at the inn-door;

Her shy and smiling eyes look’d round,

Unconscious of the place—

Unconscious of the eager gaze

He fixed upon her face.

He pluck’d a blossom from the tree—

The Judas Tree – and cast

Its purple fragrance toward the bride,

A message from the past.

The signal came, the horses plunged—

Once more she smiled around;

The purple blossom in the dust

Lay trampled on the ground.

Again the slow years fleeted.

Their passage only known

By the height the Passion-flower

Around the had grown;

And many a passing traveller

Paused at the old inn-door,

But the bride so fair and blooming,

Returned there never more.

One winter morning, Maurice,

Watching the branches bare.

Hustling and waving dimly

In the grey and misty air.

Saw blazoned on a carriage

Once more the well-known shield,

The azure fleurs-de-lis and stars

Upon a silver field.

He looked – was that pale woman,

So grave, so worn, so sad.

The child once young and smiling,

The bride once fair and glad?

What grief had dimmed that glory

And brought that dark eclipse

Upon her blue eyes’ radiance,

And paled those trembling lips?

What memory of past sorrow,

What stab of present pain

Brought that deep look of anguish,

That watched the dismal rain?

That watched (with the absent spirit

That looks, yet does not see)

The dead and leafless branches

Upon the Judas Tree?

The slow, dark months crept onward

Upon their icy way.

Till April broke in showers

And Spring smiles forth in May,

Upon the apple-blossoms

The sun shone bright again,

When slowly up the highway

Came a long funeral train.

The bells tolled slowly, sadly,

For a noble spirit fled:

Slowly, in pomp and honour,

They bore the quiet dead.

Upon a black-plumed charger

One rode, who held a shield.

Where azure fleurs-de-lis and stars

Shone on a silver field.

’Mid all that homage given

To a fluttering heart at rest.

Perhaps an honest sorrow

Dwelt only in one breast.

One by the inn-door standing

Watched with fast-dropping tears

The long procession passing,

And thought of bygone years.

The boyish, silent homage

To child and bride unknown,

The pitying, tender sorrow

Kept in his heart alone.

Now laid upon the coffin

With a purple flower, might be

Told to the cold (load sleeper;

The rest could only see

A fragrant purple blossom

Plucked from a Judas Tree.

•   •   •   •   •

THE POOR PENSIONER

I met her in the corridor, walking to and fro, and muttering to herself with a down-looking aspect, and a severe economy of dress, the season considered. I wondered how she came there, and was, to say the least of it, decidedly startled when she stopped directly opposite me, and lifting a pair of blank, brown eyes to my face, said, in a stern voice:

“He was not guilty, my lord judge. God will right him yet. It will all come out someday. It can wait: yes I can wait. I am more patient than death; I am more patient than injustice.”

I made a hasty and undignified retreat downstairs when she left the passage free, and, meeting the waiter, inquired who the woman was. The man touched his forehead significantly, and said that she was harmless (I was very glad to hear it); and that she lived on the broken victuals; and that his mistress always gave her a dinner on Christmas-day. While we were speaking together, she descended to where we stood, and repeated the exact formula of which she had made use before. She was a tall woman, strong-limbed, and thin to meagreness. She might be fifty, or perhaps fifty-five; her skin was withered, and tanned by exposure to all sorts of weathers, and her uncovered hair was burned to a rusty iron grey. The waiter suggested to her to go to the kitchen fire; at which she broke into a scornful laugh, and reiterated, “I am more patient than death. I am more patient than injustice,” and then walked out at the open door into the snow. “I don’t think she feels it, sir,” said the waiter, opening my door for me to enter.

I do not think she did. I watched her from my window. She took up a handful of the newly-fallen snow and thrust it into her bosom, then hugged it close, as if it were a living thing, that could be warmed by that eager clasp; I saw also, as she turned her dark face up toward the sky, that the anger scowl left it. I should imagine that sensation in her was dead, except in one corner of her heart, to which had gathered the memory of some miserable wrong, whose acuteuess would bide with her to the day of her death.

Her name, as I learned on further inquiry, was Hester. She had been born and bred in the Yorkshire dales; her parents were of the yeoman class, and poor through improvidence rather than misfortune. As a girl, Hester was remarkable for her pride and her beauty, of which no more relics remained than are left of the summer rose-garden in drear and misty November. She received the scant education common to her condition half-a-century ago, and grew up a wild, wilful-tempered girl, impatient of all restraint, and eager for change and excitement. At sixteen she married, and very shortly afterward her husband found it expedient to leave the dales, and to enlist in a regiment which was ordered on foreign service. Hester followed him to India, and led the life of camps for several years. During this interval, her family lost sight of her completely; for, having parted in anger, no correspondence was kept up between them. This silence and separation lasted full nine years, during which time Death dealt hardly with those left at home. Of all the large family of sons and daughters whom the old people had seen grow up to man’s and woman’s estate, not one survived. Their hearts began to soften toward the offending child, and they made efforts to learn if the regiment to which her husband belonged had returned to England. It had not.

One bleak and wintry night, while the solitary and bereaved couple were sitting by their silent hearth – it was a very lonely and retired spot where the house stood – a heavy step came up the little garden path. Neither of them stirred. They thought it was one of the farm servants returning from the village, whither he had been sent on some errand. The curtains had not been closed over the window, and all the room, filled with the shine of a yuletide fire, was visible to the wayfarer without. The mother sat facing the window; lifting her slow, dull gaze from the white wood-ashes on the hearth, she looked across toward it, and uttered a low, frightened cry. She saw a dark face peeping in at the glass, which wore the traits of her daughter Hester. She thought it was her wraith, and said so to the old man, who, taking a lantern, went out to see if anybody was lurking about. It was a very boisterous night: loud with wind, and black with clouds of sleety rain. At the threshold he stumbled over a dark form, which had crouched there for the slight shelter afforded by the porch. He lowered the lantern, and threw the light on the face of a woman.

“Dame! dame! It is our bairn; it is little Hester!”

The mother appeared, and, with a great gasping cry, recognized her daughter.

They led her into the house, toward the glowing heat of the fire, and set her down by the hearth; for her limbs would scarcely support her. Hester wore a thin and ragged cloak, beneath the folds of which she had hidden her child from the storm. He had fallen asleep in her bosom; but as her mother removed the dripping garment from her shoulders, he woke up with a laugh of childish surprise and pleasure. He was a fine, well-grown boy, of from six to seven years old, and showed none of those signs of want and suffering which had given premature age upon the wasted features and gaunt frame of his mother. It was some time before Hester recovered from her frozen exhaustion, and then her first and eager demand was for food for the child.

“Oh heaven pity me!” cried the old woman, who was weeping over the pair. “Hester and her lad starving, while there was to spare at home!” She supplied their wants soon, and would have taken the boy; but Hester held him to her with a close and jealous grasp, chafing his limbs, warming his little hands in her bosom, and covering his hand with passionate kisses.

He fell asleep in her arms at last; and then she told her brief story. She was widowed; her husband had died in India from a wound-fever, and she had been sent home to England; on her arrival there she found herself destitute, and had traversed the country on foot, subsisting by the casual charity of strangers. Thus much she said, and no more. She indulged in no details of her own exquisite suffering; perhaps they were forgotten, when she ended by saying, “Thank the Lord, the lad is saved!”

Hester lived on at the farm with her parents; and, as the old man failed more and more daily, she took the vigorous management of it upon herself, and things throve with them. By degrees, her beauty was restored, and then she had repeated offers of marriage; for, the inheritance which would be hers at her father’s death was by no means despicable. But, she kept herself single, for the lad’s sake. Wilfred grew strong, handsome, and high-spirited – like his mother, indeed, with whom, much as they loved each other, he had many a fierce contention. He never could bear to be thwarted or checked by her, and of ten Hester, in the bitterness of her unbridled anger, would cry, “O Wilfred! it would have been better for thee and thy mother if we had died on the door-stone in the snow, that night we came home.”

Still, she had an intense pride in him; and always after their quarrels, she allowed his extravagance to have freer scope, though that was what usually led to their disputes. As might have been expected, Wilfred, under such uncertain training, became reckless, wild, and domineering, though he preserved a certain rough generosity and frankness of character which redeemed his faults, and made him a favourite with the country folks, and a sort of king among his companions, whose superior in all rustic sports he was.

His grandfather died when he was nineteen; his grandmother, eighteen months later. Then Hester was sole mistress of the little farm. Wilfred soon began to urge his mother to sell the property and leave the dales, whose uneventful quiet fretted his restless disposition. This she absolutely refused to do: and was on one occasion so deeply irritated at his persistence as to say:

“I would sell the Ings to save your life, Wilfred, but for nothing less!”

There was at this time, living on a neighbouring farm, an old man of the name of Price, who had a granddaughter to keep his house. She was called Nelly; and besides being a small heiress, was a beauty and something of a coquette. Nelly had a short, plump little figure; a complexion as soft and clear as a blush-rose, and auburn hair. Wilfred fell in love. He was a tall, hardy, self-willed and proud young fellow; but in Nelly’s hands he was plastic as wax, and weak as water. She encouraged him, teased him, caressed him, mocked him, set him beside himself. She played off all her little witcheries and fascinations up- on him; looked sweetly unconscious of their mischievous influence; and, when Wilfred stormed and raved, she laughed in his face. He wanted to marry her immediately; she had played with him long enough, he thought; and one evening when she had been soft and coy, rather than teasing, he put his fortune to the proof. She told him flatly she did not like him – wherein Nelly told anything but the truth, as perhaps better women have done under like circumstances.

Wilfred took her reply in earnest, and went away in a rage – mad, jealous, and burning with passionate disappointment. Hester hated Kelly, and gave her not a few hard words; for in her camp life, the mother had culled some epithets, more expressive than polite, which she used with vigorous truth when her wrath was excited. She kept her son’s wound raw and sore by frequent scornful allusions to his “Nelly Graceless,” and did her best to widen the breach between them with ample success.

Wilfred staid away from the Prices’ for ten whole days.

This desertion did not suit the golden-headed, but tinsel-hearted little coquette. She contrived to meet him in a shady wood-walk, where they had often loitered together. He was out with his dog and gun; very ill at ease in mind, for his handsome face looked sullen and dangerous, and he would not see her as she passed by. Mortified and angry, Nelly went home and cried herself ill. Wilfred heard she had caught a fever, and must needs go to ask. She met him at the garden gate, with a smile and a blush; whereat Wilfred was so glad, that he forgot to reproach her. There was, in consequence, a complete reconciliation, ratified by kisses and promises – light coin with beauty Nell, but real heart-gold with poor infatuated Wilfred. Hester almost despised her son when she heard of it.

“She is only fooling thee, lad!” said she, indignantly. “Come a richer suitor to the door, she’ll throw thee over. She is only a light, false-hearted lass, not worth a whistle of thine.”

Therein Hester spake truth.

Nelly played with her lover as a cat plays with a mouse. Wilfred urged their marriage. She would one day, and the next day she would not. Then arose other difficulties. Hester did not want an interloper by her fireside, and would not give up the farm to her son; in fact, she was so jealous of his affection, that the thought of his marriage was hateful to her. Old Price said the young folks might settle with him, if they would; but Nelly liked the house at the Ings better, and thought Wilfred ought to take her there. When he explained that the property was his mother’s for her life, she immediately accused him of not loving her, and assumed a decided coldness and repulsiveness of manner. Wilfred, both hurt and angry, tried to give her up, but his bonds were not so easily escaped. If he staid away from her two days, on the third he was sure to be at her side, either winning her with tender words, or reproaching her with bitter ones. Nelly must have found the game a pleasant one, for she kept it up a long time, undergoing herself as many changes of hue and form as a bubble blown up into the sunshine.

Frequently during his lengthy visits at the Glebe Farm, Wilfred had encountered a man, Joseph Rigby by name, a dales-yeoman, and one of considerable wealth, but no education. This man was one of the last in the world to excite jealousy; but presently Wilfred was compelled to see that Nelly gave the coarse-mannered, middle-aged Rigby, more of her attentions than consorted with her position as his promised wife. He charged her with the fact. At first she denied it with blushes, and tears, and loud protestations; but at last confessed that Rigby had proposed to her – she did not dare to add that she had half-accepted him. They parted in mutual displeasure: and old Price said, as they agreed so badly, they had better break off the match, and Nelly should marry Joseph Rigby, who was well-to-do, and would know how to keep his wife in order. Wilfred went near her no more.

Presently it was rumoured in the countryside that Nelly Price and Mr. Rigby were to be married after the October fairs. Hester sneered, prophesied that the rich yeoman would repent his bargain before St. Mark’s, and rejoiced greatly at her son’s escape. Meanwhile Wilfred went about the farm and the house, silent, moody, and spiritless. He was quite changed, and, as his mother thought, for the letter. Instead of associating with his former companions, he staid much at home, and again renewed his entreaties that his mother would sell the Ings, and leave the dales together. He wanted to emigrate. He did not care where they went, so that they got away from that hateful place. Hester was as reluctant as ever to comply; but she modified her refusal – they would try a year longer: if he were still in the same mind at the end of that period – well, perhaps she would yield to his urgent wishes.

On the morning of the Leeford Fair he left home early, and returned toward dusk – so it was said by Hester. No other person saw him until noon next day. Joseph Rigby was found murdered, and thrown into a gully by the Leeford road that night. There were traces of a violent struggle upon the road, and the body had been dragged some distance. It had been rifled of money and watch, but a broad engraved ring which Rigby wore on the fourth finger of his left hand, was not removed. He was known to have left the market-hall at Leeford with a considerable sum in gold upon his person, for his brother-in-law had remonstrated with him about carrying so much; but the doomed man made light of his warnings. The whole countryside was up, for the murder was a barbarous one. Suspicion fell at once on Hester’s son. His behaviour at Leeford had attracted observation. He had been seen to use angry gestures to Rigby, who had laughed at him, and had offered the young man his hand, as if wishing to be friends; the other had rejected it, and turned away shaking his clenched fist. He had also been seen to mount his horse at the inn-door, and ride off in the afternoon. Rigby started about an hour later, and alone. He was seen no more until his body was found in the ditch by some men going to their work in the morning.

When Wilfred was taken, he and his mother were sitting by the fireside together: she sewing, he reading. It was toward twilight, and he had not been over the threshold all day. He was very downcast and gloomy; irritable when spoken to, and short in his answers. His mother said to him that he was very strange, and added that she wished he would give over hankering after Nelly Graceless. He laughed painfully, and did not lift his eyes from his book. There was a loud knock at the door. Hester rose and opened it. Three men pushed their way into the house, the foremost asking if her son was at home. “Yes; he is there by the fire. What do you want with him?”

“You must come with us, Mr. Wilfred – nay, it’s no use showing fight,” cried a burly, muscular fellow, laying his hand heavily on his shoulder; for Wilfred had turned deadly pale, and had attempted to shake off the man’s grasp.

“What is it for?” asked Hester, with her eyes on her son.

“God knows – I don’t,” said he, quietly.

“Mr. Rigby was robbed and murdered last night, as he came home from Leeford Fair, and suspicion points at your lad, mistress,” said the man, who still held his hand on Wilfred’s shoulder.

Hester gave utterance to no frantic denials; she laughed even.

“Why he was at home by this hour, yesterday, in this very room, at his tea. Wasn’t he, Jessy?” said she, turning to the maidservant; who, with a countenance of alarm, stood by the door.

The girl said “Yes”; then hesitated, and said she didn’t see young master when she brought in tea.

“I was upstairs,” said Wilfred.

“You had better keep that for another time and place ; you must go with us now,” observed the man.

Wilfred made no resistance. His mother brought him his coat and helped him to put it on.

“Say thou didn’t do it, Willy – only say so!” whispered she, fiercely.

“I didn’t, mother: so help me God!” was his fervent reply.

“You hear him!” cried Hester, turning to the men; “you hear him! He never lied in his days. He might have killed Rigby in a fair fight, or in hot blood; but he is not the lad to lie in wait at night, to murder his enemy and rob him! He is not a thief, this son of mine!”

The officers urged their departure. Wilfred was placed in the vehicle which had been brought for the purpose, and driven off. “I’ll follow thee, Willy!” cried his mother. “Keep up thy heart; they can’t touch thee! Good-bye, my poor lad!” They were out of hearing, and Hester turned back into the house, cursing Nelly Graceless in her heart.

•   •   •

Wilfred was committed to take his trial at the winter jail-delivery on a charge of wilful murder. The evidence against him was overwhelming. Hester sold Ings and collected all the money she could, that, if gold would buy his redemption, it might be done; for herself, she had perfect faith in his innocence, and was confident of his acquittal, but few persons, if any shared in her feelings. The best legal advice had been retained for the accused, and the trial came on shortly before Christmas. Hester was the only witness for her son. The woman Jessy’s evidence damaged his cause considerably. She contradicted herself over and over again, and at last, flurried and confused, she burst into tears, and crying out that she would say anything to get her young master off. There was nobody to speak with certainty as to the prisoner’s having been at home by a certain hour but his mother; he had put his horse into the stable himself, the groom being absent at the fair, and Jessy could not swear that he was in to tea; she believed not; only one cup was used.

Two witnesses, labourers on a farm near the Ings, swore to having seen and spoken to the prisoner after the hour stated; they said he was riding fast, and seemed agitated, but it was too dark to see his face. Nelly Price also had her word against him; it was drawn from her reluctantly, in the midst of shame-faced tears and noisy sobs, but it quite overthrew the attempt to prove an alibi. She stated that she had watched until dark, in the garden, for Wilfred’s return from Leeford, and had not seen him go by. The prisoner never looked toward her, but murmured that he had gone home by the bridle-road and Low Lane to avoid passing the Glebe Farm. The former witnesses, on being recalled, said that it was on the highway, nearly a mile from the place where the lower road branched off, and nearer to the Ings, that they encountered the accused. These two decent men, being strictly cross-examined, never swerved from their first story an iota, and agreed in every particular. They were individuals of decent character; both had worked on the prisoner’s farm, and acknowledged him to be a liberal and kind master. Their evidence was not to be shaken. As a final and damning proof of guilt, the watch of which the murdered man had been robbed was produced; it had been found concealed under the thatch of an out-house at the Ings. At this point of the evidence, the prisoner was observed to draw himself up and look round defiantly, – despair gave him a fictitious strength, perhaps, or, was it conscious innocence!

Wilfred spoke in his own defence, briefly, but strongly. His life, he said, was sworn away, but he was as guiltless of the crime laid to his charge as any of those gentlemen who sat in judgment upon him. His mother, who had remained in court all the time and had never spoken except when called upon for her evidence, had preserved a stoical calmness throughout. When he ceased to speak, however, she cried out in a quivering voice.

“My lad, thy mother believes thee!”

Some friend would have led her out, but she refused to go. The jury gave their verdict of guilty without any recommendation to mercy, and the sentence of death was pronounced. Then it was that Hester rose on her feet and faltered that formula of words with which she had startled me in the corridor:

“He is not guilty, my lord judge. God will right him yet. It will all come out someday. I can wait; yes, I can wait. I am more patient than death. I am more patient than injustice.”

Wilfred died stubborn and unconfessing; on the scaffold, with his last breath, he persisted in asserting his innocence. His mother bade him farewell, and was carried to this inn, where she had stayed, raving in a frenzy-fit. For many months she was subject to restraint, but, recovering in some measure, she was at length set at liberty. Her mind was still distraught, however; she wandered back to the dales and to her old home, but the new owner had taken possession, and after enduring her intrusions for some time, he was compelled to apply for her removal.

After this, her money being lost or exhausted, she strayed about the country in a purposeless way; begging or doing day’s work in the field, until she strayed here again, and became the Pensioner of the Holly Tree. The poor demented creature is always treated kindly, but her son’s sentence has not yet been reversed in men’s judgement. Every morning during the time the judges are in the neighbouring Assize town she waits in one of the streets through which they must pass to reach the court; and as the gilded coach, the noisy trumpets, and the decrepit halberdiers, go by, she scowls at them from beneath her shaggy brows, and mutters her formula of defiance. She will die saying it; comforting her poor, worn, wounded heart with its smarting balm.

Will she find, when she comes before the Tribunal of Eternal decrees, that she has leaned thus upon a broken reed, or will she find her son there, free from the guilt of blood?

The Great Judge only knows.

•   •   •   •   •

THE BILL

I could scarcely believe, when I came to the last word of the foregoing recital and finished it off with a flourish, as I am apt to do when I make an end of writing, that I had been snowed up a whole week. The time had hung so lightly on my hands, and the Holly-Tree, so bare at first, had borne so many berries for me, that I should have been in great doubt of the fact but for a piece of documentary evidence that lay upon my table.

The road had been dug out of the snow, on the previous day, and the document in question was my Bill. It testified, emphatically, to my having eaten, drunk and warmed myself, and slept, among the sheltering branches of the Holly-Tree, seven days and nights. I had yesterday allowed the road twenty-four hours to improve itself, finding that I required that additional margin of time for the completion of my task. I had ordered my bill to be upon the table, and a chaise to be at the door, “at eight o’clock tomorrow evening.” It was eight o’clock tomorrow evening, when I buckled up my travelling writing-desk in its leather case, paid my bin and got on my warm coats and wrappers. Of course no time now remained for my travelling on to add a frozen tear to the icicles which were doubtless hanging plentifully about the farm-house where I had first seen Angela. What I had to do, was, to get across to Liverpool by the shortest open road, there to meet my heavy baggage and embark. It was quite enough to do, and I had not an hour too much time to do it in.

I had taken leave of all my Holly-Tree friends – almost, for the time being, of my bashfulness too – and was standing for half a minute at the inn-door, watching the ostler as he took another turn at the cord which tied my portmanteau on the chaise, when I saw lamps coming down toward the Holly-Tree. The road was so padded with snow that no wheels were audible; but, all of us who were standing at the inn-door, saw lamps coming on, and at a lively rate too, between the walls of snow that had been heaped up on either side of the track. The chambermaid instantly divined how the case stood, and called to the ostler: “Tom, this is a Gretna job!” The ostler knowing that her sex instinctively scented a marriage or anything in that direction, rushed up the yard, bawling, “Next four out!” and in a moment the whole establishment was thrown into commotion.

I had a melancholy interest in seeing the happy man who loved and was beloved; and, therefore, instead of driving off at once I remained at the inn-door when the fugitives drove up. A bright-eyed fellow, muffled in a mantle, jumped out so briskly that he almost overthrew me. He turned to apologize, and by Heavens it was Edwin!

“Charley!” said he, recoiling. “Gracious powers, what do you do here?”

“Edwin,” said I, recoiling. “Gracious powers, what do you do here?” I struck my forehead, as I said it, and an insupportable blaze of light seemed to shoot before my eyes. He hurried me into the little parlour (always kept with a slow fire in it and no poker), where posting company waited while their horses were putting to; and shutting the door said:

“Charley, forgive me!”

“Edwin!” I returned. “Was this well? When I loved her so dearly! When I had garnered up my heart so long!” I could say no more.

He was shocked when he saw how moved I was, and made the cruel observation that he had not thought I should have taken it so much to heart.

I looked at him. I reproached him no more. But I looked at him.

“My dear, dear Charley,” said he; “don’t think ill of me I beseech you! I know you have a right to my utmost confidence, and, believe me, you have ever had it until now. I abhor secrecy. Its meanness is intolerable to me. But I and my dear girl have observed it for your sake.”

He and his dear girl! It steeled me.

“You have observed it for my sake, sir?” said I wondering how his frank face could face it out so.

“Yes! and Angela’s,” said he.

I found the room reeling round in an uncertain way, like a labouring humming-top. “Explain yourself,” said I, holding on by one hand to an armchair.

“Dear old darling Charley!” returned Edwin in his cordial manner, “consider! When you were going on so happily with Angela, why should I compromise you with the old gentleman by making you a party to our engagement, and (after he had declined my proposals) to our secret intention! Surely it was better that you should be able honourably to say, ‘He never took counsel with me, never told me, never breathed a word of it.’ If Angela suspected it and showed me all the favour and support she could – God bless her for a precious creature and a priceless wife! – I couldn’t help that. Neither I nor Emmeline ever told her, any more than we told you. And for the same good reason, Charley; trust me, for the same good reason, and no other upon earth!”

Emmeline was Angela’s cousin. Lived with her. Had been brought up with her. Was her father’s ward. Had property.

“Emmeline is in the chaise, my dear Edwin?” said I, embracing him with the greatest affection. “My good fellow!” said he, “do you suppose I should be going to Gretna Green without her?”

I ran out with Edwin, I opened the chaise door, I took Emmeline in my arms, I folded her to my heart. She was wrapped in soft, white fur, like the snowy landscape; but was warm, and young and lovely. I put their leaders to with my own hands, I gave the boys a five-pound note apiece, I cheered them as they drove away, I drove the other way myself as hard as I could pelt.

I never went to Liverpool, I never went to America, I went straight back to London, and I married Angela. I have never until this time, even to her, disclosed the secret of my character, and the mistrust and the mistaken journey into which it led me. When she, and they, and our eight children and their seven – I mean Edwin’s and Emmeline’s, whose eldest girl is old enough now to wear white fur herself, and to look very like her mother in it – come to read these pages, as of course they will, I shall hardly fail to be found out at last. Never mind! I can bear it. I begun at the Holly-Tree, by idle accident, to associate the Christmas time of year with human interest, and with some inquiry into, and some care for the lives of those by whom I find myself surrounded. I hope that I am none the worse for it, and that no one near me, or afar, is the worse for it. And I say, May the green Holly-Tree flourish, striking its roots deep into our English ground, and having its germinating qualities carried by the birds of Heaven all over the world.

•  THE END  •