I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the power of
faery.
I had gone with a young man and his sister—friends and relations of my
own—to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were coming home
talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought
us, unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking,
where Sphinxes and Chimæras sit open-eyed and where there are always
murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was an
imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made
the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly
across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not see
anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of
the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a
ruined church covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called
“the Old Town,” which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell’s
day. We had stood for some few minutes, so far as I can recollect,
looking over the fields full of stones and brambles and elder-bushes,
when I saw a small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed, mounting
up slowly towards the sky; then we saw other faint lights for a minute
or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch moving
rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems
all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly
ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning
impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps
I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of
reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however,
I talked it over with my two friends, and compared their somewhat
meagre recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the
more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable
as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I
remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was
sitting reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading
and writing a couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower
of peas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking
at it I heard the sound again, and presently, while I was alone in
the room, I heard a sound as if something much bigger than a pea had
struck the wainscoting beside my head. And after that for some days
came other sights and sounds, not to me but to the girl, her brother,
and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire
that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot moving
about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who
live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in
earlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did they
come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had
shone for a moment?
1902.