TO SLEEP—PERCHANCE TO DREAM!
My heart a charmed slumber keeps
And a languid fire creeps
Through my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
From thy rose-red lips my name
Floweth. And then, as in a swoon,
With dinning sounds my ears are rife.
My tremulous tongue faltereth.
I lose my colour, I lose my breath,
I drink the cup of a costly death
Brimmed with delirious draughts of warmest life!
—TENNYSON (_Eleänore_).
Ellinor brought so weary a body, so weary a mind to bed that night, that
almost as soon as her head touched the pillow she fell into a deep
dreamless sleep.
But before long a dim consciousness of trouble began to stir within her
mind, a feeling of sorrow and oppression to bring sighs from her breast.
There was in her ears a sound as of lamentation and tears. At first this
was vaguely interwoven with her own sub-acute consciousness of distress;
but presently, and suddenly it seemed, it became so insistent that she
started and sat straight up in bed, eyes and ears alert, staring and
listening.
It was her custom to keep both her windows uncurtained at night, so
that, waking, she might exchange a look with his stars, and sleeping,
let them look at her. One window was always wide open. Like a flower,
she craved for all the light and air that heaven and earth could give.
She sat and stared and listened. Not from her own heart, as she at first
thought, did these sounds of trouble ring in her dream: attuned to
trouble as it was, her heart had but echoed another’s misery.
Something—what was it? Nothing human, surely—was appealing, calling with
moans and whines, like that of some piteous trapped animal that clamours
to the unhearing skies. Aye, and that square of closed moonlit window,
where there should be but the silhouette of an ivy spray or two, was
blocked out by some monstrous shape. Again she thought it was nothing
human, though the casement shook and there were sounds of taps as if
from desperate hands. Her pulses beat thick and hard in her temples and
she had a moment’s paralysing terror. But she was at least a fearless
woman. The next instant she sprang out of bed, and wrapping herself in
the cloak that lay to her hand, she seized the rushlight and advanced
boldly. Before raising an alarm she would see for herself what the thing
was.
She had not reached within a yard of the window, when with an
exclamation of mingled relief and astonishment, she laid the light aside
and sprang forward and flung open the casement.
“Barnaby!” she cried, and drew the boy by main force into the room.
He fell like a dead weight at her feet, exhausted, unable to sustain
himself, his hands feebly closing upon the hem of her garment as if
thereby clinging to safety.
On the wall of the Herb-Garden the young poetaster Herrick had sought a
sentimental seat from which he could feast his love-lorn gaze on the
windows of Mrs. Marvel’s chamber; and, watching the tiny flickering
light within rise and sink against the naked panes, feast his heart on
God knows what innocently passionate dreams.
It was an ideal night for such dreamings; and the Italian-soft airs that
blew upon young Romeo’s cheek could scarcely have been more tender than
this English Lammas-night breath that gently fanned young Luke’s ardour.
A night of nights to sit lost in luxurious despair, to rock a fancied
sorrow and a fanciful love with poetic metre and rhyme; to weave the
sacred thought of the lady’s bower with the melancholy of the moonlit
hour, the sob of unrequited love with the plaint of the night-bird in
the grove.
To this idyllic love-dream what an awakening! Shattering these ideals
how brutal, how horrid a reality!
There came running steps in the shaded garden paths, a black, furtive
figure across a white-lit garden space; and then—Herrick looked and
rubbed his eyes like a child and looked again before he could believe—a
man’s figure, to his distressed vision tall and largely proportioned,
climbing, yes, ye gods! climbing up, up, the ivy ropes, up to that
window where his own fancy hardly dared to-night to reach, albeit with
such reverend haltings, with such swoonings almost from its own
temerity.
The night picture swam before his eyes. He gripped the stones on either
side of him. When the mists cleared, he must look again. He looked and
saw a white figure, all white even as he had held her to be—all white
above the world—was it a minute, was it a lifetime ago? The white figure
opened its arms, drew into its embrace the dark visitor. All the
whiteness seemed to become lost in the blackness. Black, too, it grew
before the eyes of the youthful poet—black the whole world and black his
heart!
He let himself drop from his perch down into the herb-beds. And there he
lay, crushing vervaine and balsam and sweet thyme into aromatic death.
There he lay a long, long time.
Mistress Margery Nutmeg had tied her goffered nightcap under her decent
chin and laid her respectable head upon a chaste pillow with all her
usual expectation of that rest which is the reward of an excellent
conscience. But (as she afterwards averred) the first strange thing in a
night which was to prove one of the strangest at Bindon-Cheveral was
that she could not sleep. She felt, she said, as if the Angel of Death
was beating his wings about the House; and whenever she closed her eyes
she saw rows of little phials before her; and, considering she was so
much accustomed to poor dear Master Rickart’s odd ways, it was the most
curious thing of all that she could not get the thought of Poison out of
her head. At last she could almost have believed she was beginning to
doze when there came sounds without her window as of a tapping, a
scratching, a scraping, a rustling.
She listened; there was no mistake. Out of bed she got. Out of the
window she looked!
In Lady Lochore’s boudoir, despite the midnight hour, the candles were
still burning in goodly array, illuminating round the green board four
tired faces, the play of eight hands, the flutter of cards and the flash
of dice. Two of these faces showed greedy interest: the wax-like
pale-orbed countenance, to wit, of the Dishonourable Caroline and the
oriental visage of Villars. But the third, Lady Lochore’s, fever-spotted
and haunted, beheld the capricious fortunes of chance ebb or flow with
equal indifference. What cared she whether gold grew in a little pile
beside her, or whether she had to jot down sums no banker would credit
now to the name of Lochore? As little for the game, as little for loss
or profit, as small Priscilla herself, whose black-rimmed eyes pleaded
for bed, who took no pains to conceal her yawns and played her cards as
if she were already in a dream.
Yet Lady Lochore was eager to keep company about her to-night. She was
the first to insist on the fresh round; the first to press the willing
elderly gamblers to another cast. It seemed as if she wanted to throw
her heart into the excitement; to hear the rattle of the dice and her
own loud laugh; to force herself to interest in her opponents’ wrangles;
to pin her attention to the adding of points and the deduction of loss
and gain—as if she welcomed anything that might drown the small
insistent whisper at her ear. Anything to drive away the vision of the
great four-post bed waiting for her in the night’s solitude.
Crouching at Ellinor’s feet, Barnaby was trying to tell her, to tell her
something, to get her aid for something, with all the agonised effort of
the human soul struggling to find expression through limitations worse
than those of the brute animal. Deaf and dumb, and so vital a message to
be conveyed!
With patience as pitiful as the creature was pitiable, Ellinor bent and
tried in vain to understand.
How he had come to seek her in so perilous a fashion she had, however,
no difficulty in divining. It was but too likely that Master Simon in
his present condition had been oblivious of his prisoner, insensible of
his cries and knocks. But, with his ape-like activity, the lad could
escape easily enough through the window; and she was herself the only
person from whom he could confidently seek help. All that she could
understand readily enough. But why should he require this help?
As a first thought she endeavoured to discover if he were hungry; he
vehemently shook his head. He almost struck from her hand the glass of
water she, misled by his repeated gesture of one in the act of drinking,
then held to his lips. He was obviously in sore need of restorative, but
the mental distress overshadowed the physical. Now his plucking fingers
began to urge her to the door: he pointed, dragged himself a little way
on his hands and knees, like a dog, came back and again pulled her
towards it.
Ellinor might have been more alarmed had she not remembered his attack
on Lady Lochore, and been persuaded that the poor fellow was still
suffering from the effects of her father’s mania for experiment.
She resolved at length to humour the boy as far as she could, and at the
same time, from her own little pharmacy downstairs, to obtain some
harmless sedative and then coax him into bed again. Drawing her cloak
more closely over her white garb, she took up the rushlight in one hand
and extended the other to Barnaby, who in joy staggered to his feet and
precipitated himself forward.
As they entered the ante-room there came from the stone passage without
a sound of unfaltering steps, approaching with singular rapidity. They
hardly seemed to halt a second upon the threshold of the outer door
before its lock was turned and it opened before them.
Ellinor glanced at Barnaby in surprise, and marked a sudden terror in
his face that infected her in spite of herself. But the next instant, as
she looked round to see Sir David standing before her, sprung as it were
out of the blackness, the feeling gave way to a glow of courage.
Ellinor’s heart always rose to the fence. Barnaby, however, remained
very differently impressed; the human soul in him seemed to wither away
in fear. Like an animal before some abnormal manifestation of nature, he
crept back, cowering, with eyes fixed on the new-comer’s face, to the
further corner of the inner room.
So impossible a situation was it that her cousin should seek her in her
own apartment at midnight, that it hardly needed the look on his face to
convince her that something was strangely wrong.
Faint as was the gleam of colour thrown by the rushlight she held aloft,
his countenance appeared to her all transfigured; so much so that she
had an unreasoning impression that his white face itself diffused
radiance in the gloom. His heavy hair was tossed away from his forehead
as if wild fingers had played with it. Fragments of moss, a withered
leaf here and there, clung to his garments; but it did not need this
evidence to tell Ellinor that he was straight from the woods—the breath
of the trees and of the deep night emanated from him, fresh and pungent,
indescribable.
“David!” she cried, retreating step by step from his advance. “I
thought, I hoped you had been asleep!”
“Asleep!” he answered. He tossed his hair from his brow. “Nay, Ellinor I
have but just awakened from a long, long sleep: from a sleep like the
sleep of death.”
Notwithstanding his pallor, he looked strong and young; the tired lines
and the unconscious frown of sorrow were smoothed away. Slowly she had
stepped back into the inner room and he had followed eagerly. She had
little thought at the moment for transgressed conventions. Every energy
of her being was absorbed in the desire so to deal with him as to give
no shock to a brain acting under some inexplicable influence. She
instinctively felt that he must be treated even as the sleep-walker who
has above all things to be guarded against sudden waking.
Assuming a look of perfect calmness, she lit her candles and made him
welcome with a smile as if her white bedchamber had been a drawing-room,
and she, in her cloaked nightdress, had worn garments of state.
“Sit down, dear cousin, and we can talk a little—but not long, for we
both must sleep.”
His eye clung to her, as she moved about, with an unfaltering gaze of
delight. So had she seen him look at his stars! In her turmoil of doubt
and anxiety there was an under movement, as of a long conceived joy that
had strength to stir at last. Even if he were distraught, he loved her!
But the impression that things were ill with him soon devoured every
other.
“I, sit down!” he cried. “I, sleep! Nay, Ellinor, do you not understand!
I have been in bondage all this time, and now this blessed cup you gave
me has set my soul free. First it ran like fire through my veins. It
drove me out into the woods, I ran among the singing trees. I cannot
tell how it was with me, but I felt strength growing within my soul.
There was struggle, there was pain, but this giant strength grew up. I
fought. One by one I broke the rusting chains that so long have bound
me—I threw the links away! Memories, doubt, hate, despondency, I cast
them all by! I stood in the glade, looked up to the stars. I was
free—free, Ellinor, free to act, free to speak. To love you, to love
you...! Then the trees took voice: ‘Go to her!’ they said, and waved
their arms towards you. They ran with me. Straight as the arrow from the
bow, I started, leaping over the mountains. And now, Ellinor, love, I
have come!”
He drew near to her as he spoke, and in his hands, cold as ice, he held
both hers. She would not have drawn away if she could. About herself
with David she had not a second’s doubt; by a look, she knew, she could
have thrown him to her feet.
His words flowed on like ceaseless music. Was woman ever wooed by lips
so eloquent and so beautiful, with touch so passionate and yet so
reverent! The pity of it: it was only a dream!
“I knew you were waiting for me in your white garments, with your light
burning. I knew you would open your inner door for me. Oh, faithful
heart!”
Now he raised both her hands and brushed them with his lips one after
the other but so lightly that she hardly knew the caress. Then she felt
his arms hover about her like wings: the shadow of a lover’s embrace. He
bent his face close to hers. His voice, through passionate inflexions,
sank to an undertone of tenderness.
“You have stood beside me on my platform at night. You did not know it
always, but you were always there! You have stood beside me in the dawn,
and in the dawn I sought you in the garden. Ah, that morning I would
have broken my chains and awakened to freedom if I could! Always, since
that first night, my heart has been singing to you, though my lips were
silent. But you heard, did you not, the song of my heart? I heard the
song of yours, Ellinor, through all the evil things that beat around me,
demons of the past that put troubles and discords between two songs that
should ever rise together. Do not say anything—do not tell me anything
of those dark hours!” he went on, arresting her as she was about to
speak. The serenity of his own countenance became disturbed for a
moment, its radiance overclouded. He fixed her, with piercing question:
“Can I trust you?”
And, her true eyes on his, she made answer:
“To the death!”
He drew a long deep breath; and, with both hands, made a gesture as if
thrusting back victoriously some spectre enemy. Smiling, and with
exultation clanging in his voice:
“See, see,” he cried, “how they fade, how they melt away! Freedom is
ours!”
Now he flung his arm around her and strained her to his breast. To be
held to his heart and feel the passion of his embrace—it ought to have
brought to her that sweet ecstasy of trouble, which to a pure woman is
sacred to her only love. But to Ellinor this moment was perhaps the
cruellest of her life. Must love remain to her ever but a dream, that
only in dream, or in delirium, she should be wooed! Her dominant
thought, however, was still for David. She saw him, like the
sleep-walker of the legend, advancing along a perilous bridge beneath
which lay the chasm of madness or death.
“Oh, God,” she cried in her soul, “let not mine be the hand to thrust
him down!”
Then, as if in answer to her prayer, there came upon her through the
open window, like a promise of peace, the vision of the night’s sky.
Just against the black edge of the tower, emerging even as she looked,
appeared pure and bright and steady the effulgent light of the new star.
“See, David,” she said, and turned his face from its ardent seeking of
her own, “there are the stars, there is your Star, looking in upon us!
Shall we not go and look at her from the tower. Surely she is even more
radiant than usual!”
For a second his passion resisted the gentle touch; then all at once she
felt his frenzied grasp relax. She drew a long breath! She slipped from
his relaxing hold as the mother slips her arm from under her sleeping
child. A change came over his face; a wistful expression of struggle and
doubt as between reason and madness. But the next instant the wild light
flamed up again.
“The star!” he whispered, then loudly repeated: “My star!” and stretched
out his arms to it, with the airy unmeasured gesture of the delirious.
Her heart stood still. Like a fire or a fever, his exaltation had but
leaped up the higher for the momentary check.
“Ellinor, my star! The world’s desire, my love—I come to you!”
He made a spring towards the window, and paused. With arms still wide
outstretched, he looked like some god poised before taking wing for
endless space. She flung herself against him, and forced him back from
the window.
“David—Beloved...!” And, almost with relief, she felt the second danger
of his passion close round her again.
“My star!” he repeated exultingly. His voice rang out now with high
unnatural note, now sank to rapid whispering. “Sweet miracle—the star
that shines in my sky and walks in beauty beside me! You remember, you
remember, Ellinor,” he whispered, “we had met already, that first night,
spirit to spirit, my soul to yours, O Star, before we met in the flesh!”
He laughed in joy, and she felt the scalding tears rush up to her eyes.
“Ah, poor David!”
“Oh, I knew you at once! There you shone out of the dim old room, as you
had shone out of my black spaces. Your brow of radiance, your hair of
fire! And your eyes—oh, blue, blue! Ellinor, you remember! I kissed
you—my star! I held you and I kissed you.” The whisper now sank so low
that she could hardly follow his words. A tremor had come into the arms
that encompassed her. She felt as if a weakness, a dimness, were
gathered upon him. “That night we opened the door and stood upon the
threshold of the golden chamber. Why did we not go in? I do not know.
Shall we not go in now? Ellinor, bride, give me again your lips, those
lips that have haunted me waking and sleeping. Ellinor!”
The last articulate words broke way almost upon a moan. He was breathing
with panting effort. Suddenly he swayed, and she upheld him. Then he
failed altogether, and she guided his fall—strong as she was, it was all
she could do—till he lay stretched his length on the floor at her feet.
Then she knelt beside him.
His eyes looked up at her, pleading through the mists that were
thickening over them. His lips, without sound, formed the prayer for her
kiss. She knew not what despair was coming upon her. The apprehensions,
vague yet so evil, that had yet been gathering thick about her all this
strange acute hour, seemed now massed into one terrible tangible shape:
in a second she must look upon its awful face. Well, what she could
still give her beloved in life—that she would give from her breaking
woman’s heart.
And bending down, she laid her lips upon his.
She thought it was the kiss of death. He smiled faintly, his eyelids
fell. Like a child, he turned his head upon his arm and drew a long deep
sigh as of the peace of repose after unutterable restlessness. She
crouched down close to watch for the moment of the passing of all she
loved.
Once before she had seen another strong man’s life go from him as she
knelt by his side; had known the very instant between the last heaving
of his breast and its eternal stillness. And she thought now, that when
that minute should again strike for her and she should wait for the
sound of the breath that was never to come, her own life would be driven
out under the pressure of that slow agony!
So prepared was she for horror that she could hardly credit her own
senses when presently it was borne in upon her that his respiration was
becoming gradually deeper and more assured, that his pallid face was
assuming a more natural look. She slid her trembling fingers upon his
hand; it was warm and humanly relaxed.
He was alive! He was asleep! The Spectre of Terror had fled from before
her without unveiling its countenance. She had thought their kiss was
the kiss of death, and behold, it was as the kiss of Life!
Yet the tide of relief, passionate as it was, could not carry away with
it all doubt and fear. He was deaf to her call, insensible to the
pressure of her fingers. Even as she knew that no man in ordinary
circumstances could fall thus suddenly from waking into slumber, she
knew that this was the unconsciousness of the drugged.