THE DREAM BY THE BROOK.
Although my story must needs be sombre wherever it has to do with that
person whose name it bears, yet I hope there will be found some sunny
spots in it. During the first few months after my arrival at Fairburn,
there was nothing to sadden life there that I knew of. I passed my days
under green leaves, and not only in a metaphorical sense; for every fine
afternoon, immediately after study was over, I betook myself to the
Park. The whole place was watched as zealously, even in summer, as the
gardens of the Hesperides, but Mr. Long had obtained permission for me
to roam at large therein. To me, vexed from childhood by Indian suns,
Fairburn Chase--as that part of the demesne most remote from the Hall
was called--was far more delightful than it could have been to any mere
English boy. Its stately avenues of oaks, tapering into infinite
distance, with their checker work of beam and shade, was the realization
of my dreams of forest beauty. Nor was its delicious coolness marred by
the broad strips of sunlight, at long but equal distances, like the
golden stairs of the Angels' Ladder; for those, I knew, marked the
interlacing of "the Rides", themselves as fair, and leading, not as the
avenue did, to the outer world, but into secret bowers known only to the
deer and me.
When Marmaduke was not with me, which often enough happened, poor
fellow, and particularly after that unfortunate meeting with his uncle
in the churchyard--the whole Chase seemed abandoned to myself. I dare
say it was not really so, and that if I had not been a privileged person
I should soon have found out my mistake, but for days and days I never
saw any human being there. Now and then the figure of a gamekeeper,
dwarfed by distance, would make its appearance for a moment, to be lost
the next in some leafy glade. But the sense of solitude was thereby
rather increased than otherwise, just as the poet tells us in a case
where the ear and not the eye was concerned, "the busy woodpecker <i>made
stiller</i> by his sound the inviolable quietness." Lying couched in fern,
in that lordly pleasure-place, I have myself entertained some poetic
thoughts, although they never found expression. Even now, as I shut my
eyes, I make an inward picture of some such resting-place; nothing to be
seen but the long green feathery stems which the summer air just stirs
about my brow, and the broad branches of the oak that stretch themselves
motionless between me and the sun; nothing to be heard but the coo of
the ring-dove, and the swift stealthy bite of the dappled deer. Nor did
Fairburn Chase lack water to complete its beauty. In front of the Hall
itself moved a broad slow stream, which presently slid rather than fell
down ledges of mossy stone into a wilderness of trees and shrubs,
through which it wandered on like one who has lost his way, but singing
blithely nevertheless. Another stream, which was my favourite, burst
spring-like from the very heart of the Chase, having been artificially
conveyed beneath the avenue, and ran quite a little river, and at a
great rate, to form the island where the herons lived; after which, as
though it had done its work, it went its way tranquilly enough: If it
had nothing to boast of but the heronry it might have been a proud
little brook, for never did colony of those solemn birds take their sad
pleasure in a more lovely spot; but besides it had a certain bend in
it--essential to the beauty of a brook as straightness is to that of a
tree--which I have never seen rivalled elsewhere. Its right bank rose
there, though not abruptly, and left half its bed of brown sand and
loose tinkling shingle bare to the sunlight, save so much of it as the
shade of a cluster of lime trees could cover. Here the bee and the bird
brought their songs, and the dragon-flies the glory of their turquoise
armour and glittering wings throughout the summer noons. The cool
fragrant smell of the limes, and the drowsy music of the insects that
haunted them, were inexpressibly pleasant to me, who, I am afraid, had
not a little of the Asiatic indolence in my nature. Sometimes a group
of swans sailed by on the unruffled stream, themselves a slumbrous
pageant fit enough to herald sleep; but at all events, swans or no
swans, I often did sleep there. One July afternoon, in particular, when
the heat was almost as intense as at Calcutta, and no punkahs to cool
one, I went to this place with malice prepense to lie there and do
nothing, which, from my youth up, has always been synonymous with a
<i>siesta</i>. I cannot do absolutely nothing, and yet keep awake. I very
much admire the people whom I often meet in railway carriages, who
endure, without books or newspapers, hundreds of miles of weary travel,
and who do it with their eyes open. I wonder they do not break out into
a melody, or at least a whistle. They cannot possibly be thinking all
that time, and indeed they have no appearance of employing themselves in
that way, but "stare right on with calm eternal eyes," with no more
speculation in them than those of the sphinx herself. I envy, but I
cannot imitate those happy persons. There is no such state of coma with
me; I either wake or sleep.
I lay, then, beneath the limes by the brook in Fairburn Chase,
half-buried in the soft brown sand; and even while I looked upon the
glancing stream, with the grand old willow opposite, that bent its hoary
honours half-way o'er, the scene dissolved and changed; the brook became
a river, and the willow a palm-tree, and the Chase a sandy tract, and
the fir-clump on the distant hill the snow-capped Himalaya. I saw,
too--and, alas! I was never more to see them, except, as then, in
dreams--my father and my mother; but they passed by me with pitiful,
loving looks, and went their way. Then the ayah, the black nurse who
was watching over me--for I was once more a child--stole down to the
river-brink, and drew a fluted dagger from her bosom, and dipped it in
the sacred flood, and I felt that I was to die. I knew her well; we two
had loved one another as nurse and child do love, where the nurse
perforce takes half the mother's part; as the child grows up, his
affection, at the best, congeals to gratitude; but not so with the
breast that suckled him--God forgive us men; and the pain of my dream
was sharpest because it was my own dear ayah who was about to slay me. I
had offended Vishnu, or else she would not have done it; her gods
demanded my life of her; but she was sorry; I felt her cold lips upon my
brow, and then a large round tear fell upon my cheek like icy hail, and
I awoke. There was a tumult of sounds in the air; the birds, and the
bees, and the bubbling wave, silent while I had slept, seemed to have
burst out together in chorus at my waking. I was bewildered, and knew
not where I was. My dream was more distinct at first than the realities
about me. If I had but closed my eyes again, I knew that it would be
continued at the spot where it had left off, that the fluted dagger
would have drunk my life-blood; and therefore I made an effort to rouse
myself. Wondrous are dreams, and wondrous the borderland 'twixt life and
sleep! If my existence had depended upon it, I could not, for some
seconds, have told for certain whether I was in England or in India.
Then reason began to reassume her sway, and the vague mysterious powers,
of whom we shall one day perhaps have a more certain knowledge, withdrew
reluctant from their usurped dominion over me. I remembered, however,
most distinctly every incident that they had brought about, and I
placed my hand mechanically upon my left cheek--I had been lying upon my
right--upon which the tear had seemed to fall. Great Heaven, <i>it was
still wet</i>! I was really startled. The cloudless sky forbade the idea of
a drop of rain having fallen; I had shed no tear myself while dreaming,
for my eyes were dry, and even if I had, it could scarcely have dropped
as it did, making a cool round spot in the centre of the cheek--it would
have slid down and left a little frigid line: there were no stones for
the stream to splash against and thus besprinkle me.
It was very odd. Still, I did not imagine for a moment that my poor
black nurse had really come across the seas to drop the tributary tear
upon her sleeping boy; moreover, she could scarcely have got away so
suddenly without leaving some trace of her departure, some...--My heart
all of a sudden ceased to beat; a shiver ran through me, as runs from
stem to stern through a doomed ship that comes end on at speed upon a
sunken rock; my eyes had fallen--while I thus reasoned with myself--upon
a sight to terrify an older man than I, after such a dream; <i>the print
of a woman's bare feet in the sand</i>. Had there been any
footprints--those of a keeper or watcher, for instance--I should have
been startled to know that some one had passed by while I slumbered, for
most certainly the sand had been untrodden up to the moment I had lost
consciousness; but that a woman with naked feet had been really present
while I dreamed that horrible dream, was something more than startling.
In Scotland such a circumstance would have been less remarkable, but in
Fairburn I had not yet seen any person without shoes. There were a
considerable number of footprints, but only of one individual: she had
stood beside me for some time, for they were deeper close to the place
where I had lain, and there was also one impression there which looked
as though the mysterious visitor had knelt. They had come and returned
the same way, which was not the one that I had come myself, and they
began and ended at the stream-side a few yards beyond, and out of sight
of the bend which was my favourite haunt. The woman had doubtless
crossed and recrossed by means of some natural stepping-stones that
showed their heads above water; there was no path on the other side, but
only a tangled thicket, through which it would have been impossible to
track her, even had I been so disposed, which I was not. To say truth, I
was terribly discomposed. For a minute or two I clung to the notion that
the footprints were my own, made, perhaps, under the influence of
somnambulism. I took off my shoes, and measured the tracks with my own
feet, but I found, boy as I was, that mine effaced them. They were
certainly the marks of a woman; smaller than those of a grown male, yet
firmer set than those of a child. Never since the days of Robinson
Crusoe was ever man so panic-struck by footprints in the sand as I.
Although it was broad daylight, and the air was alive with sounds, I
fairly trembled. The many evil stories which, during my short stay at
Fairburn, I had already heard of the old Hall, a corner of which I could
discern from where I stood, crowded in upon my brain; the whole demesne
seemed under a malign influence--enchanted ground. I turned from the
spot, whose lonely beauty had once so won my soul, with fear and
loathing; and as I turned, there rang out--it may have been from the
thicket across the stream, but the echoes took it up so suddenly, that
it seemed to ring all around me--a laugh so terrible, so demoniacally
mocking, that I could scarcely believe it came from mortal throat. Again
and again it rose, and circled about, as though it would have headed my
fleeing steps, and driven me back upon some dreadful Thing, while I fled
through the fern towards home at my topmost speed, and the white-tailed
rabbits scampered to left and right, less frightened than I.