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 creamygloire de Dijonsin 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 slighttincture 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 staya monthwith 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—sottishlysuperstitious; 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—aboutyou.”
“Aboutme?” 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—sotangibly 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—anddisbelieve.”
“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 wasreally; but at some time, in the blackest and darkest of the night, I seemed to wake. It appeared as if a noisehad 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 slidout 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 feelnowthe 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 allevents 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 wastoodreadful! 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! Whatdidyou 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——” AgainI 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 youboth—you and your husband, lyingdead—murdered—drowned in your own blood!”
“What, both of us?” she says, trying to laugh, but her healthy cheek has rather paled.
“Both of you,” I answer, with growing excitement. “You, Jane, had evidently been the one first attacked—taken off in your sleep—for you were lying just as you would havelain in slumber, only that across your throat from there to there” (touching first one ear and then the other), “there was a huge and yawning gash.”
“Pleasant,” replies she, with a slight shiver.
“I never saw any one dead,” continue I earnestly, “never until last night. I had not the faintest idea how dead people looked, even people who died quietly, nor has any picture ever given me at all a clear conception of death’s dread look. How then could I haveimaginedthe hideous contraction and distortion of feature, the staring starting open eyes—glazed yet agonized—the tightly clenched teeth that go to make up the picture, that isnow, this very minute, standing out in ugly vividness before my mind’s eye?” I stop, but she does not avail herself of the pause to make any remark, neither does she look any longer at all laughingly inclined.
“And yet,” continue I, with a voice shakenby emotion, “it wasyou,veryyou, not partly you and partly some one else, as is mostly the case in dreams, but as muchyou, as theyouI am touching now” (laying my finger on her arm as I speak).
“And my old man, Robin,” says poor Jane, rather tearfully, after a moment’s silence, “what about him? Did you see him? Was he dead too?”
“It was evidently he whom I had heard struggling and crying,” I answer with a strong shudder, which I cannot keep down, “for it was clear that he had fought for his life. He was lying half on the bed and half on the floor, and one clenched hand was grasping a great piece of the sheet; he was lying head downwards, as if, after his last struggle, he had fallen forwards. All his grey hair was reddened and stained, and I could see that the rift in his throat was as deep as that in yours.”
“I wish you would stop,” cries Jane, pale asashes, and speaking with an accent of unwilling terror; “you are making me quite sick!”
“Imustfinish,” I answer earnestly, “since it has come in time I am sure it has come for some purpose. Listen to me till the end; it is very near.” She does not speak, and I take her silence for assent. “I was staring at you both in a stony way,” I go on, a feeling—if I felt at all—that I was turning idiotic with horror—standing in exactly the same spot, with my neck craned to look round the door, and my eyes unable to stir from that hideous scarlet bed, when a slight noise, as of some one cautiously stepping on the carpet, turned my stony terror into a living quivering agony. I looked and saw a man with his back towards me walking across the room from the bed to the dressing-table. He was dressed in the dirty fustian of an ordinary workman, and in his hand he held a red wet sickle. When he reached the dressing-table he laid it down onthe floor beside him, and began to collect all the rings, open the cases of the bracelets, and hurry the trinkets of all sorts into his pockets. While he was thus busy I caught a full view of the reflection of the face in the glass—— I stop for breath, my heart is panting almost as hardly as it seemed to pant during the awful moments I am describing.
“What was he like—what was he like?” cries Jane, greatly excited. “Did you see him distinctly enough to recollect his features again? Would you know him again if you saw him?”
“Should I know my own face if I saw it in the glass?” I ask scornfully. “I see every line of itnowmore clearly than I do yours, though that is before my eyes, and the other only before my memory——”
“Well, what was he like?—be quick, for heaven’s sake.”
“The first moment that I caught sight ofhim,” continue I, speaking quickly, “I felt certain that he was Irish; to no other nationality could such a type of face have belonged. His wild rough hair fell down over his forehead, reaching his shagged and overhanging brows. He had the wide grinning slit of a mouth—the long nose, the cunningly twinkling eyes—that one so often sees, in combination with a shambling gait and ragged tail-coat, at the railway stations or in the harvest fields at this time of year.” A pause. “I do not know how it came to me,” I go on presently; “but I felt as convinced as if I had been told—as if I had known it for a positive fact—that he was one of your own labourers—one of your own harvest men. Have you any Irishmen working for you?”
“Of course we have,” answers Jane, rather sharply, “but that proves nothing. Do not they, as you observed just now, come over in droves at this time of the year for the harvest?”
“I am sorry,” say I, sighing. “I wish you had not. Well, let me finish; I have just done—I had been holding the door-handle mechanically in my hand; I suppose I pulled it unconsciously towards me, for the door hinge creaked a little, but quite audibly. To my unspeakable horror the man turned round and saw me. Good God! he would cut my throat too with that red,redreaping hook! I tried to get into the passage and lock the door, but the key was on the inside. I tried to scream, I tried to run; but voice and legs disobeyed me. The bed and room and man began to dance before me; a black earthquake seemed to swallow me up, and I suppose I fell down in a swoon. When I awokereallythe blessed morning had come, and a robin was singing outside my window on an apple bough. There—you have it all, and now let me look for a ‘Bradshaw,’ for I am so frightened and unhinged that go I must.”