When Amaryllis rose from her knees her face was quite white, emotion had taken away her colour, and tears were thick on her cheek. She sat a little while by the table to recover herself, still thinking, and remembered that again last night she had dreamed the same dream about fire in the thatch. Somehow there seemed to be an alarm in the night, and they ran out of doors and found the corner of the roof on fire, over the window with the wire network instead of glass. It ran up from the corner towards the chimney, where the roof was mossy by the ridge. There was no flame, but a deep red seething heat, as if the straw burned inwardly, and was glowing like molten metal. Each straw seemed to lie in the furious heat, and a light to flicker up and down, as if it breathed fire. The thatch was very thick there, she knew, and recollected it quite well in her dream; Iden himself had laid on two thick coats in his time, and it was heavy enough before then. He talked about the thatching of it, because it was an argument with him that straw had a great power of endurance, and was equal to slates for lasting. This thickness, she saw, was the reason the fire did not blaze up quickly, and why, fortunately, it was slow in moving up the roof. It had not yet eaten through, so that there was no draught—once it got through, it would burn fast—if only they could put it out before then all might yet be saved. In the midst of her anxiety Iden came with the largest ladder in the rickyard, and mounted up, carrying a bucket of water. She tried to follow, holding on to the rungs of the ladder with one hand, and dragging up a heavy bucket with the other—the strain and effort to get up woke her.
This dream had happened to her so many times, and was so vivid and circumstantial—the fire seemed to glow in the thatch—that at last she began to dread lest it should come true. If it did not come true of the house itself, perhaps it would of the family, and of their affairs; perhaps it signified that the fire of debt, and poverty, and misfortune would burn them, as it were, to the ground. She tried to think whether in the dream they were getting the fire under before she woke, or whether they could not master it; it seemed dubious.
She did not tell her mother of the dream, afraid lest it might excite her again; nor could she tell Iden, who would have laughed at her.
Yet, though she knew it was but a dream, and dreams have ceased to come true, she did not like it; she felt uncertain, as if some indefinable danger was threatening round about. As she sat at the table she added to her prayer the supplication that the dear old house might not be burned down.
Soon afterwards she went downstairs, and on the lower flight paused, to listen to voices—not those of her mother and Iden—creditors, doubtless, come to cry aloud, “Pay me that thou owest!”—the very sum and total of religion. Her heart beat quicker—the voices came again, and she thought she recognized them, and that they were not those of creditors. She entered the sitting-room, and found that two visitors, from widely separated places, had arrived; one with a portmanteau, the other with an old, many-coloured carpetbag. They were Amadis Iden, from Iden Court, over the Downs, the Court Idens, as they were called, and Alere Flamma, from London; the Flammas were carpetbag people.
Her father was making them very welcome, after his wont, and they were talking of the house the Idens of yore had built in a lonely spot, expressly in order that they might drink, drink, drink undisturbed by their unreasonable wives.
XXVI
They talked on and on, these three, Iden, Amadis Iden, and Alere Flamma, with Amaryllis listening, from the end of April till near the end of May; till “a month passed away,” and still they were talking. For there is nothing so good to the human heart as well agreed conversation, when you know that your companion will answer to your thought as the anvil meets the hammer, ringing sound to merry stroke; better than wine, better than sleep, like love itself—for love
