TALES FOR CHRISTMAS EVE.

TALES
FOR
CHRISTMAS EVE.

BY
RHODA BROUGHTON,
AUTHOR OF
“COMETH UP AS A FLOWER,”
ETC., ETC.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON.
1873.

CONTENTS.

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH, AND
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.

THE TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH,
AND
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.

MRS. DE WYNT TO MRS. MONTRESOR.

“18, Eccleston Square,
“May 5th.

“My Dearest Cecilia,

“Talk of the friendships of Orestes and Pylades, of Julie and Claire, what are they to ours? Did Pylades ever go ventre à terre, half over London on a day more broiling than any but an âme damnée could even imagine, in order that Orestes might be comfortably housed for the season? Did Claire ever hold sweet converse with from fifty to one hundred house agents, in order that Julie might have three windows to her drawing-room and a pretty portière? You see I am determined not to be done out of my full meed of gratitude.

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

“‘Failure No. 253, I don’t doubt,’ I said to myself, as I toiled up the steps with my soul athirst for afternoon tea, and feeling as ill-tempered as you please. So much for my spirit of prophecy. Fate, I have noticed, is often fond of contradicting us flat, and giving the lie to our little predictions. Once inside, I thought I had got into a small compartment of Heaven by mistake. Fresh as a daisy, clean as a cherry, bright as a seraph’s face, it is all these, and a hundred more, only that my limited stock of similes is exhausted. Two drawing-rooms as pretty as ever woman crammed with people she did not care two straws about; white curtains with rose-coloured ones underneath, festooned in the sweetest way; marvellously, immorally becoming, my dear, as I ascertained entirely for your benefit, in the mirrors, of which there are about a dozen and a half; Persian mats, easy-chairs, and lounges suited to every possible physical conformation, from the Apollo Belvedere to Miss Biffin; and a thousand of the important little trivialities that make up the sum of a woman’s life: ormolu garden gates, handleless cups, naked boys and décolleté shepherdesses; not to speak of a family of china pugs, with blue ribbons round their necks, which ought of themselves to have added fifty pounds a year to the rent. Apropos, I asked, in fear and trembling, what the rent might be—‘three hundred pounds a year.’ A feather would have knocked me down. I could hardly believe my ears, and made the woman repeat it several times, that there might be no mistake. To this hour it is a mystery to me.

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

“Your attached
“Elizabeth De Wynt.”

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

MRS. MONTRESOR TO MRS. DE WYNT.

“32, —— Street, May Fair,
“May 14th.

“Dearest Bessy,

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

“Yours affectionately,
“Cecilia Montresor.”

MRS. DE WYNT TO MRS. MONTRESOR.

“The Lord Warden, Dover,
“May 18th.

“Dearest Cecilia,

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

“Your disconsolate
“Bessy.”

MRS. MONTRESOR TO MRS. DE WYNT.

“32, —— Street, May Fair,
“May 27th.

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

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

“Yours, in great agitation,
“Cecilia.”

MRS. DE WYNT TO MRS. MONTRESOR.

“The Lord Warden, Dover,
“May 28th.

“Dearest Cecilia,

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

“Yours,
“Bessy.”

MRS. MONTRESOR TO MRS. DE WYNT.

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

“Dearest Bessy,

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

“‘Seven white ghostisses

Sitting on seven white postisses.’

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

“‘Fare thee well, and if for ever,

Then for ever, fare thee well,’

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

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

“Your broken-hearted
“Cecilia.”

This is a true story.

THE MAN WITH THE NOSE.

THE MAN WITH THE NOSE.

[The details of this little story are of course imaginary, but the main incidents are, to the best of my belief, facts. They happened twenty, or more than twenty years ago.]

CHAPTER I.

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

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

“Never mind; get one!”

I obey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh—no—no—not there!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine,

Whose breast of waters broadly swells

Between the banks which bear the vine,”

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

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

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

So the Rhine it is.

CHAPTER II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stops, panting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was a dream then, I suppose?”

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

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

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

“Him! but who is him?”

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

“That—dreadful—man!” she says, while her whole body is one tremor.

“What dreadful man?” cry I, impatiently.

She is silent.

“Who was he?”

“I do not know.”

“Did you ever see him before?”

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

“What was he like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Often, often,” I answer, reassuringly.

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

“None, none!”

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

“There he is!—there!—there!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She breaks off into hysterical sobbing.

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

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

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

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

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

“And his name?”

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

“What countryman was he?”

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

“Whither did he go?”

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

CHAPTER IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let us try,” she says, coaxingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“None—none—only—stay—stay!”

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

CHAPTER V.

This time it is not a false alarm; this time it really has gone to his stomach, and, declining to be dislodged thence, kills him. My return is therefore retarded until after the funeral and the reading of the will. The latter is so satisfactory, and my time is so fully occupied with a multiplicity of attendant business, that I have no leisure to regret the delay. I write to Elizabeth, but receive no letters from her. This surprises and makes me rather angry, but does not alarm me. “If she had been ill, if anything had happened, Morris would have written. She never was great at writing, poor little soul. What dear little babyish notes she used to send me during our engagement; perhaps she wishes to punish me for my disobedience to her wishes. Well, now she will see who was in the right.” I am drawing near her now; I am walking up from the railway station at Lucerne. I am very joyful as I march along under an umbrella, in the grand broad shining of the summer afternoon. I think with pensive passion of the last glimpse I had of my beloved—her small and wistful face looking out from among the thick fair fleece of her long hair—winking away her tears and blowing kisses to me. It is a new sensation to me to have any one looking tearfully wistful over my departure. I draw near the great glaring Schweizerhof, with its colonnaded, tourist-crowded porch; here are all the pomegranates as I left them, in their green tubs, with their scarlet blossoms, and the dusty oleanders in a row. I look up at our windows; nobody is looking out from them; they are open, and the curtains are alternately swelled out and drawn in by the softly-playful wind. I run quickly upstairs and burst noisily into the sitting-room. Empty, perfectly empty! I open the adjoining door into the bedroom, crying “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” but I receive no answer. Empty too. A feeling of indignation creeps over me as I think, “Knowing the time of my return, she might have managed to be indoors.” I have returned to the silent sitting-room, where the only noise is the wind still playing hide-and-seek with the curtains. As I look vacantly round my eye catches sight of a letter lying on the table. I pick it up mechanically and look at the address. Good heavens! what can this mean? It is my own, that I sent her two days ago, unopened, with the seal unbroken. Does she carry her resentment so far as not even to open my letters? I spring at the bell and violently ring it. It is answered by the waiter who has always specially attended us.

“Is madame gone out?”

The man opens his mouth and stares at me.

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Yes—be quick.”

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

“And did not return in the evening?”

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

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

“Perhaps it was the brother of madame.”

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

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

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

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

“They went in a carriage.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEHOLD, IT WAS A DREAM!

BEHOLD, IT WAS A DREAM!

CHAPTER I.

Yesterday morning I received the following letter:

“Weston House, Caulfield, ——shire.

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

“Ever yours affectionately,
“Jane Watson.

“August 15th.

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

This is my answer:

“My dear Jane,—Kill the fat calf in all haste, and put the bake meats into the oven, for I will come. Do not, however, imagine that I am moved thereunto by the prospect of the bright-headed curate. Believe me, my dear, I am as yet at a distance of ten long good years from an addiction to the minor clergy. If I survive the crossing of that seething, heaving, tumbling abomination, St. George’s Channel, you may expect me on Tuesday next. I have been groping for hours in ‘Bradshaw’s’ darkness that may be felt, and I have arrived at length at this twilight result, that I may arrive at your station at 6·55 P.M. But the ways of ‘Bradshaw’ are not our ways, and I may either rush violently past or never attain it. If I do, and if on my arrival I see some rustic vehicle, guided by a startlingly ugly gentleman, awaiting me, I shall know from your wifely description that it is your ‘old man.’ Till Tuesday, then,

“Affectionately yours,
“Dinah Bellairs.

“August 17th.”

I am as good as my word; on Tuesday I set off. For four mortal hours and a half I am disastrously, hideously, diabolically sick. For four hours and a half I curse the day on which I was born, the day on which Jane Watson was born, the day on which her old man was born, and lastly—but oh! not, not leastly—the day and the dock on which and in which the Leinster’s plunging, courtseying, throbbing body was born. On arriving at Holyhead, feeling convinced from my sensations that, as the French say, I touch my last hour, I indistinctly request to be allowed to stay on board and die, then and there; but as the stewardess and my maid take a different view of my situation, and insist upon forcing my cloak and bonnet on my dying body and limp head, I at length succeed in staggering on deck and off the accursed boat. I am then well shaken up for two or three hours in the Irish mail, and after crawling along a slow by-line for two or three hours more, am at length, at 6·55, landed, battered, tired, dust-blacked, and qualmish, at the little roadside station of Caulfield. My maid and I are the only passengers who descend. The train snorts its slow way onwards, and I am left gazing at the calm crimson death of the August sun, and smelling the sweet-peas in the station-master’s garden border. I look round in search of Jane’s promised tax-cart, and steel my nerves for the contemplation of her old man’s unlovely features. But the only vehicle which I see is a tiny two-wheeled pony carriage, drawn by a small and tub-shaped bay pony and driven by a lady in a hat, whose face is turned expectantly towards me. I go up and recognise my friend, whom I have not seen for two years—not since before she fell in with her old man and espoused him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II.

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

“Do I?” say I, rather faintly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I pause in my narrative.

“Well?” says Jane, a little impatiently.

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

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

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

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

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

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