Gazing on this, a weary sleep stole over his senses, and for a full hour the worn-out man slept profoundly.
Into this slumber slowly wound a dream, of which he could afterwards remember only that it was somehow horrible.
Dark and direful grew his slumber thus visited; and in a way that accorded well with its terrors, he was awakened.
XXXIV
Awake
In his dream, a pale frightened face approached him slowly, and recoiling uttered a cry. The scream was horribly prolonged as the figure receded. He thought he recognised someone—dead or living he could not say—in the strange, Grecian face, fixed as marble, that with enormous eyes, had looked into his.
With this sound ringing in his ears he awoke. As is the case with other overfatigued men, on whom, at length, slumber has seized, he was for a time in the attitude of wakefulness before his senses and his recollection were thoroughly aroused, and his dream quite dissipated. Another long shriek, and another, and another, he heard. Charles recognised, he fancied, his wife’s voice. Scared, and wide awake, he ran from the room—to the foot of the stairs—up the stairs. A tread of feet he heard in the room, and the door violently shaken, and another long, agonized scream.
Over this roof and around it is the serenest and happiest night. The brilliant moon, the dark azure and wide field of stars make it a night for holy thoughts, and lovers’ vigils, so tender and beautiful. There is no moaning night-wind, not even a rustle in the thick ivy. The window gives no sound, except when the gray moth floating in its shadow taps softly on the pane. You can hear the leaf that drops of itself from the treetop, and flits its way from bough to spray to the ground.
Even in that gentle night there move, however, symbols of guilt and danger. While the small birds, with head under wing, nestle in their leafy nooks, the white owl glides with noiseless wing, a murderous phantom, cutting the air. The demure cat creeps on and on softly as a gray shadow till its green eyes glare close on its prey. Nature, with her gentleness and cruelty, her sublimity and meanness, resembles that microcosm, the human heart, in which lodge so many contrarieties, and the shabby contends with the heroic, the diabolic with the angelic.
In this still night Alice’s heart was heavy. Who can account for those sudden, silent, but terrible changes in the spiritual vision which interpose as it were a thin coloured medium between ourselves and the realities that surround us—how all objects, retaining their outlines, lose their rosy glow and golden lights, and on a sudden fade into dismallest gray and green?
“Dulcibella, do you think he’s coming? Oh! Dulcibella, do you think he’ll come tonight?”
“He may, dear. Why shouldn’t he? Lie down, my child, and don’t be sitting up in your bed so. You’ll never go asleep while you’re listening and watching. Nothing but fidgets, and only the wider awake the longer you watch. Well I know it, and many a long hour I laid awake myself expectin’ and listenin’ for poor Crane a-comin’ home with the cart from market, long ago. He had his failin’s—as who has not? poor Crane—but an honest man, and good-natured, and would not hurt a fly, and never a wry word out of his mouth, exceptin’, maybe, one or two, which he never meant them, when he was in liquor, as who is there, Miss Ally, will not be sometimes? But he was a kind, handsome fellow, and sore was my heart when he was taken,” and Dulcibella wiped her eyes. “Seven-and-twenty years agone last Stephen’s Day I buried him in Wyvern Churchyard, and I tried to keep the little business agoin’, but I couldn’t make it pay nohow, and when it pleased God to take my little girl six years after, I gave all up and went to live at the vicarage. But as I was sayin’, miss, many a long hour I sat up a-watchin’ for my poor Crane on his way home. He would sometimes stop a bit on the way, wi’ a friend or two, at the Cat and Fiddle—’twas the only thing I could ever say wasn’t quite as I could a’ liked in my poor Crane. And that’s how I came to serve your good mother, miss, and your poor father, the good vicar o’ Wyvern—there’s not been none like him since, not one—no, indeed.”
“You remember mamma very well?”
“Like yesterday, miss,” said old Dulcibella, who often answered that question. “Like yesterday, the pretty lady. She always looked so pleasant, too—a smiling face, like the light of the sun coming into a room.”
“I wonder, Dulcibella, there was no picture.”
“No picture. No, miss. Well, ye see, Miss Ally, dear, them pictures, I’m told, costs a deal o’ money, and they were only beginnin’ you know, and many a little expense—and Wyvern Vicarage is a small livelihood at best, and ye must be managin’ if ye’d keep it—and good to the poor they was with all that, and gave what many a richer one wouldn’t, and never spared trouble for them; they counted nothin’ trouble for no one. They loved all, and lived to one another, not a wry word ever; what one liked t’other loved, and all in the light o’ God’s blessin’. I never seen such a couple, never; they doted on one another, and loved all, and they two was like one angel.”
“Lady
