CHAPTER III.
The evening of the Wednesday following the day on which I had posted this letter was calm and tropical in the chastened tints of the western heaven and the mild splendour of the moon, whose full orb was slowly climbing over the dark masses of the trees.
I sat at my library window overlooking the black grounds, deep in a fit of abstraction, perceiving without heeding the tardy advent of the large tremulous stars which dropped one by one in sudden orbs of silver upon the floor of the sky. From the garden the shrill grasshoppers blew their harmonies. Now and then a black moth whizzed by my ear. Afar the bark of a dog deepened the general repose by contrast; and athwart the moon at intervals passed the sombre shadow of a bat.
A depression I could not shake off had fastened upon me. Many causes had conspired to produce it. A few weeks only had passed since my arrival, and already it seemed to me ambition was sinking dejected before the presence of that steep which it had thought to climb.
Those who know what it is to have had their minds torn by the travail of desire without birth—their souls distracted with conceptions which were powerless to shape themselves, with aspirations which were dumb, and could not pronounce the language that would have bred their gratification—will understand the mood that was then on me. The genius of Dante could never have devised keener torments than the desire of ambition without the means.
Add to this that my nature was beginning to rebel against solitude: that instinct was raising its voice against the enforced monotony of my life. Impulse had recoiled, nor had I yet instructed duty to take its place. I feared I had made a mistake in compelling a too sudden transition from a life of pleasure to a calm as of death. I should have sloped the way to my wishes; not abruptly tilted them into the abyss of my scheme.
I took from a side table a lamp of slender bronze and lighted it. I draped the windows to shut out the crystal glory of the orb whose splendour made a daylight in the air, and seating myself at a table, began to read. But labour as I might to keep my attention chained to the page, the rebellious voice of thought made the effort vain. The eye indeed followed the printed lines; but the mind took no cognisance of them.
Memory was wanton to-night. She waved her hand over the past. The mist rolled away, and the familiar scene lay unfolded.
She renewed the brainless pleasures of my town-life.
She brought before me the calm, grave lineaments of my mother.
Then fancy seized the wand and sought to unveil the future. I peered into a cloud at once luminous and dark. Amid the vapour I descried shapes whose outlines I could not determine; I heard sounds whose meaning I could not interpret.
As I gazed the cloud darkened. Red lightnings leaped from its womb; and thunder muttered.
By the electric flashes I witnessed the shapes I had before noticed in attitudes convulsed and tortured. Between the intervals of the sullen thunder-groans I marked the voices I had before heard raised in sobs, and sighs, and lamentations.
Suddenly over the whole there fell a calm. The cloud opened, and in its depth I witnessed the outline of a human face, obscured at first by the gloom, so that I could not discern the lineaments, but brightening presently to a light that shone I knew not whence.
It was a face beautiful and sad. The eyes were dark, the hair yellow, the cheeks colourless as marble shone on by the moon. How exquisitely pathetic was her gaze! My heart leapt up at the sight of her spectral beauty. Then tears dimmed my eyes and I remained watching her with clasped hands. Her lips moved; she spoke; a kind of music fell on my ear. I strained to catch the sounds; but the accents were inaudible.
“Speak, that I may understand you!” I cried; “you cloud your meaning with melody. Sink your voice—I shall interpret your appeal by the movement of your lips.”
The face brightened and grew brighter still, until the features faded in a brilliant light. Then like the lightning-flash it vanished: a deep darkness encompassed me. I was suffocated by the thick cold embrace. In the arms of Nightmare, that dolorous hag, I fought for breath, and thinking that I was dying, I uttered a cry.
I started and stared around me.
So vivid had been the vision, that I could not persuade myself it was unreal, and sought it yet. At the same moment, there was a knock on the door, and Mrs. Williams entered.
“Did you call, Sir?” she asked.
“No,” I replied, still bewildered.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Sir. I thought I heard you call as I passed through the hall.”
She withdrew.
I looked at the open book. The leaves were stained with tears. I rose, forcing a laugh.
“My imagination must be keen,” I thought, “to conceive such a dream as that. Yet I shall owe that book a grudge for sending me to sleep and filling my slumber with such odd visions. Imagine my shedding tears!”
I approached the mirror. My face was bloodless; nor had my forced merriment driven all the bewilderment out of it.
“This is the fruit of solitude,” I mused. “Reason and Imagination are natural enemies; and hence the uses of Society to give the power to Reason requisite to keep the Imagination in subjection. I must pay the penalty of seclusion, and must not complain if I find my mind growing distempered. Yet what could have evoked that face? Such a countenance I have never seen. It belongs to no experience of mine. I have not read of such a face either; for what author in his senses would give such eyes to a woman born of flesh? Such eyes as those belong to another world—a world of moonlight and dolor: where the issue of love is betrayal—where the fruition of hope is despair. Ay,” I thought, pushing the fancy, “in such a world of shadow and moonlight flowers would be colourless and without perfume; the trees would stand white as a woman’s brow, the air would wave to the dim shine of spectral shapes who would look on one another with eyes as hopeless and beautiful as hers!”
“This won’t do!” I ejaculated, giving myself an angry shake. “What is the hour? Eleven. So late? I must have slept long.” I touched the bell; a maid appeared; I ordered her to prepare supper, a meal I was partial to, even when I dined late, and which it was my custom to discuss an hour earlier. But, obedient to my instructions, Mrs. Williams had well disciplined the servants. My meals were never announced, for I had forbidden intrusion when I was in the library.
Mine were no anchorite’s repasts. I was what Wordsworth would have called “a man of purple cheer.” My means enabled me to gratify a fastidious taste; and of whatever other inelegance I might have been guilty, my table at least illustrated a refined appetite. Had I been born in those not very remote times when to lower the system was esteemed the grand panacea, I should have been the apostle, I know, of our own happier rule of keeping the system up. No bewigged or befrilled doctors would dare have blooded me! The real family physician in my eyes is the cook; and in my opinion one of Dr. Johnson’s wisest saws was, “Depend upon it, Sir, a man who does not very diligently mind his belly will mind nothing else.”
It was half-past eleven when I rose from the table. My dream still troubled me. It recurred again and again like a misgiving. I was sincerely indignant at what I esteemed my imbecility, and had hoped to put an end to the folly by a judicious application to some old Burgundy. But the generous liquor heated rather than cooled my fancy. Those lovely pleading eyes stood out before me, vivid and tremulous as stars upon the night. I left the parlour, and dismissing the servants to bed, returned to the library, lighted a cigar, and surrendered myself to thought.
I pondered the various opinions expressed by wise men on dreams. In particular I recalled these striking remarks of Coleridge: “Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment.”
In abstraction one takes no note of time. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it was close upon one. There was something uncanny in finding myself wide-awake at such an hour. I drew to the window and parted the curtains. The moon had fronted the house, and had thrown the dark shadow of the building far into the grounds. There was not a breath of air to give life to the leaves of the geraniums on the balcony. The room was close. I opened the window and drank in the cool sweetness of the night.
Would a stroll, I wondered, fatigue me and induce sleep? The grounds stretched invitingly, half dark, half radiant where they were robed in the silver veil of the moonlight. I stepped on to the balcony; a flight of stone steps led to the lawn; I descended them and entered a scene of dew, coolness, and glory.
I walked slowly forwards. The deep and general stillness wrought upon me like a spell. I passed from the shadow into the moonlight, turned, and studied the back aspect of the house. The structure lay wrapped in gloom, save where the lamp in the study shed a yellow lustre upon the half-open window. On either side the building rose trees, sombre, stately and still. Above rode the regent moon.
I strode onward, a moving shape in a world of stirless shadows. Exquisite was this radiant serenity—this scene of tender shadow and silver light, of tints spectral and sweet, cooled by an air aromatic and calm.
I gained the extremity of the grounds. A thick hedge, made solid and heightened by a row of elms, separated (with the orchard) the grounds from the garden of the adjacent house. To my right swept a range of open meadows, with here and there a knot of trees sentinelling the open sweep and swell. A portion of these fields, though not let with, belonged to Elmore Court, and were entered by a gate constructed at the spot I had now reached.
This gate I pushed open and walked leisurely towards a gentle eminence whose summit promised me a cooler air. This was my first visit to these fields.
As I advanced, I noticed on my left a low dark hedge, in which was another gate. This hedge ran about two hundred yards and then terminated. On gaining the summit of the hillock, I seated myself. Through the trees I saw the silhouette of a small house. Of my own residence I could only perceive the roof, topping the dark cloud of green that seemed to fill the grounds. Away on my left—away to the edge of a sky throbbing with stars, stretched the vague pale country, shadowless, without a light of house or gleam of beacon to give reality to its weird blank. And now I heard in the air a voice whose tones had before been shut out by the trees—the murmur of the sea. Though over two miles off, I could catch the beating of its mighty heart, could hear the purring of its breakers, as they creamed beneath the moonlight on the porous beach.
I was presently surprised by hearing the Cliffegate church clock strike two. The long-drawn notes came faintly through the stillness and warned me it was time to return home and get to bed. I rose, and was in the act of advancing, when I was suddenly arrested by perceiving a shadow—a shape—moving with tranquil step by the hedge beyond the second gate.
I gazed curiously, perhaps apprehensively. It went leisurely along, gliding rather than walking. It was draped in white, but over its back was thrown some dark covering, probably a shawl. At the distance I stood from it, I could not discern the lineaments, whether they belonged to man or woman, whether to angel or goblin, whether bloodless as belonging to a ghost, or vital as belonging to some sleepless creature who, like myself, had stolen from his chamber to woo sleep from the slumberous air.
The unexpected apparition unmanned me. The spectral moonshine, the deep night, the faint moan of the sea, the ghost-like shadows of the still trees, the hazy landscape stretching vague as a vision to the winking stars, were all friendly to superstition. I was agitated by a fear I could not control. With eyes fascinated by the phantasm—for phantasm I was disposed to deem it—I watched its solemn progress: watched it traverse the line of hedge, turn, retrace its steps, and finally disappear (so it seemed) through the hedge.
I advanced with a beating heart and rapid step toward the gate. I raised the latch with a trembling hand. But in passing I glanced back, and saw within a few yards of me the form of a woman, motionless as a marble image, her eyes fixed in my direction, her face pale as an evening cloud.
In her black and deep eyes, in her yellow hair, in her countenance of pensive beauty, I witnessed the embodiment of my vision—the cloud face of my dream.
I stood motionless. Then fear mastered me. My nerves gave way. I pulled the gate after me and fled.
I entered the house with a beating heart, closed the window with eager fear, and sought my chamber in a mood of wild agitation.
It was long ere I recovered my self-control.
Taken separately, I could have recalled the dream, I might have encountered the spectral shape, without apprehension. It was the combination—it was the leaping of my dream, so to speak, into vital embodiment that had wrought my terror. Nervous enough at all times, my naturally tremulous sensibilities had not been improved by my few weeks of solitude and day dreams. I strode about my bedroom, striving by every argument of logic and philosophy to reassure myself. It was no ghost I had seen. There was a substantiality about the shape that convinced me I had been the spectator of no “shadowy being.” What I had beheld was the form of a woman, sorrowful, noble, and serene. The features were stamped upon my memory—graven there by the stylet of Fear. Amid the darkness of the hours that intervened before the welcome morning streamed that countenance stood out.
The morning broke. The pale suffusion filled my room and found me awake. The sun uprose: the birds poured their matins. Soon the hall clock struck my usual hour of rising. I descended and entered the breakfast-room. The servant in attendance eyed me furtively. I could excuse her. I had noticed before she had seen me that my eyes were hollow, my complexion pale, my expression of the careworn kind which no attention to the toilet can diminish.
“Tell Mrs. Williams I want her,” said I.
In a few minutes Mrs. Williams appeared. She was a tranquil woman, who was never to be surprised into any emotional outbreak. I saw by the faint lifting of her brows that she remarked my altered air, but she said nothing.
“Please take that chair, Mrs. Williams.”
She seated herself and clasped her hands on her lap.
“You will see by my face that I have passed a sleepless night. My motive in desiring your presence is to put it to your female ingenuity—women are better hands at riddles than men—to solve a very mysterious conundrum that offered itself to my eyes about two o’clock this morning.”
She eyed me with a sudden furtive keenness. Neither my behaviour, my language, nor my tastes during the time she had known me had quite justified my assumption of intellect in the eyes of this healthy practical woman. I was prepared to believe that she considered me a little touched.
“You don’t look very well this morning, Sir.”
“I don’t feel very well. I met with an odd adventure last night. Close against the hedge at the bottom of the grounds I saw a woman, pacing in the moonlight. She was very beautiful; but in the calm of her beauty there was something terrible. It frightened me. It has made me ill. Is this house haunted?”
“Haunted, Sir! I have never heard of ghosts in these parts. I’ve slept every night for three years in this house by myself, and never met with anything of the kind.”
“You are lucky. I can only assure you I distinctly saw at the time mentioned a female form draped in white, with yellow hair and black eyes, such as you might dream of, such as I did dream of.”
“Are you sure, Sir, it was not a dream?”
“Quite sure,” I replied impatiently, for what is more vexing than incredulity to a mind still teased with recollection? “When I dream I usually awake to find myself in bed. If last night’s experience was a dream I must have dreamed it in the fields yonder, for when I awoke, or rather when I had fled, my clothes were heavy with dew and my hair moist.”
“Mightn’t you have gone for a stroll, Sir, and on your return, having got to bed, dreamt you saw this thing?”
“Mrs. Williams, you are a sensible woman—do not vex me. I tell you I saw this person, or ghost, or angel, or what the deuce else it was, as plainly as I see you. You have sense enough to judge from my appearance and excitement that there is something more in all this than a dream. You have lived here some time, pray have you ever heard of such a woman as I describe?”
“Never, Sir,” she rejoined with complacent emphasis.
“Think. I entreat you to think. This is a mystery I must solve. If I were superstitious I might think it a ghost, but I don’t believe in ghosts. You now are a practical woman, what is your opinion?”
“I am afraid I cannot help you, Sir. You see there are very few people living about this place, and it could hardly be one of them. There’s Mrs. Fraser, the widow, I told you of. It’s true I haven’t seen her, for I’m told she keeps as close to herself as one of the nuns at Cornpool. But I know her servant; and the girl, who’s very respectable declares her missis is the most quiet and respectable person in the world, a-bed every night at ten and up early at her gardening work, which is her chief amusement.”
“You say you have never seen this lady?”
“No, Sir. It’s not perhaps for the want of her going out—she must do that sometimes, though her servant does all her shopping for her—it’s my being shut up here. Before you came, Sir, I hardly ever left the house.”
“I should very much like to have this lady described to me. If it be she whom I saw, there will be an end of the mystery—(in one sense),” I mentally added. “If not, we must push our inquiries until we learn who this lady is I saw. Know the truth I will.”
“I don’t see how I can quite get at Mrs. Fraser,” began Mrs. Williams.
“You need not see her. Question the servant. I only want a description of the lady.”
“I can do that. I know Lucy well, Sir.”
“Will you go now and see Lucy?”
“Yes, Sir.” She rose.
“You will contrive some excuse for calling?”
“Easily, Sir.”
“After seeing her, mind to return here at once. I shall be impatient.”
She promised, and left the room. There was a half-smile upon her face as she went out. I excused it.
During her absence I opened the parcel of newspapers I received from time to time from London. But the effort to occupy my mind with their contents was idle. Like the needle to the star, my mind faithfully vibrated to its cardinal thought.
The grounds were brilliant with sunshine and flowers and the hues of ripening fruit. The air was busy with the chant of bees. Winged insects flashed like diamond-drops in their nimble flight; and the morning breeze brought to my senses the refreshing sweetness of lilacs and violets from which the sun had not yet drunk their chaplets of dew.
But for the dream that had been the harbinger of the form, I think that busy sparkling morning would have subdued, if it did not erase, the recollection from my mind. Superstition and sunlight are no friends; and it taxed memory and fancy to associate with those brilliant lights and dancing shadows, the spectral landscape, the wan moonshine, the tall and stirless shadows of the night that was gone.
Some time elapsed before Mrs. Williams returned. At length her footsteps sounded in the hall. She knocked and entered.
“Have you seen the servant?” I asked eagerly.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Did she describe Mrs. Fraser?”
“There was no need, Sir. Whilst I was talking at the gate the lady came out to pick a flower.”
“What is she like”
“She is about my height. Her eyes are black. She has a pretty face, but very mournful. She didn’t stay above a minute or two; and perhaps she was just then a little troubled. But she did look as though she cried a good deal on the quiet, or went about with a trouble she wouldn’t confess. She has little white hands, and is a good figure. Her hair is straw-colour, which makes her face peculiar, and not easy forgot. Her black eyes shouldn’t match it; and yet they do, somehow.”
“This is the lady I saw last night,” said I.
She was silent.
“Do you doubt me still, Mrs. Williams?”
“I should be sorry to have taken the liberty to doubt you before, Sir. I am sure you believe in what you say you saw.”
“You still think that I was dreaming?”
“Indeed, Sir, I don’t think at all,” she responded deprecatingly, marking my incensed eye. “I only know when I saw Mrs. Fraser, and noticed she was like the person you described, that I asked Lucy if her missis was given to walking out alone in the garden and fields at two o’clock in the morning. And Lucy answers, firing up, that she wondered what could put such notions into my head—for she had never known her missis do such a thing; and if she didn’t know it, no one else in Cliffegate could.”
“Well, well. I am obliged to you for the trouble you have taken.”
“The trouble’s a pleasure, Sir,” she answered cheerfully, pausing at the door. She hesitated, and then said, “You’ll pardon my boldness, Sir, but I think you’d be acting wisely were you to give over reading in those books for a little, and think more of your health.”
“My reading won’t injure my health,” said I, laughing.
“But if you were to see a little company now”———
“I shall have company soon,” I interrupted.
“I am very glad to hear it, Sir,” she remarked, and withdrew.
I sank into deep thought.
“Oh God!” cries Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a thing of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
Nguồn: Wikisource English — My Beautiful Neighbour/Volume 2/Chapter 3. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.