The spring has come. The air of the April night just lifts the leaves
of the sleeping flowers. The moon is queen in the cloudless and starless
sky. The stillness of the midnight hour is abroad, over land and over
sea.
In a villa on the westward shore of the Isle of Wight, the glass doors
which lead from the drawing-room to the garden are yet open. The shaded
lamp yet burns on the table. A lady sits by the lamp, reading. From time
to time she looks out into the garden, and sees the white-robed figure
of a young girl pacing slowly to and fro in the soft brightness of the
moonlight on the lawn. Sorrow and suspense have set their mark on the
lady. Not rivals only, but friends who formerly admired her, agree
now that she looks worn and aged. The more merciful judgment of others
remarks, with equal truth, that her eyes, her hair, her simple grace
and grandeur of movement have lost but little of their olden charms. The
truth lies, as usual, between the two extremes. In spite of sorrow and
suffering, Mrs. Crayford is the beautiful Mrs. Crayford still.
The delicious silence of the hour is softly disturbed by the voice of
the younger lady in the garden.
“Go to the piano, Lucy. It is a night for music. Play something that is
worthy of the night.”
Mrs. Crayford looks round at the clock on the mantelpiece.
“My dear Clara, it is past twelve! Remember what the doctor told you.
You ought to have been in bed an hour ago.”
“Half an hour, Lucy--give me half an hour more! Look at the moonlight
on the sea. Is it possible to go to bed on such a night as this? Play
something, Lucy--something spiritual and divine.”
Earnestly pleading with her friend, Clara advances toward the window.
She too has suffered under the wasting influences of suspense. Her face
has lost its youthful freshness; no delicate flush of color rises on
it when she speaks. The soft gray eyes which won Frank’s heart in the
by-gone time are sadly altered now. In repose, they have a dimmed and
wearied look. In action, they are wild and restless, like eyes suddenly
wakened from startling dreams. Robed in white--her soft brown hair
hanging loosely over her shoulders--there is something weird and
ghost-like in the girl, as she moves nearer and nearer to the window in
the full light of the moon--pleading for music that shall be worthy of
the mystery and the beauty of the night.
“Will you come in here if I play to you?” Mrs. Crayford asks. “It is a
risk, my love, to be out so long in the night air.”
“No! no! I like it. Play--while I am out here looking at the sea. It
quiets me; it comforts me; it does me good.”
She glides back, ghost-like, over the lawn. Mrs. Crayford rises, and
puts down the volume that she has been reading. It is a record of
explorations in the Arctic seas. The time has gone by when the two
lonely women could take an interest in subjects not connected with their
own anxieties. Now, when hope is fast failing them--now, when their last
news of the _Wanderer_ and the _Sea-mew_ is news that is more than two
years old--they can read of nothing, they can think of nothing, but
dangers and discoveries, losses and rescues in the terrible Polar seas.
Unwillingly, Mrs. Crayford puts her book aside, and opens the
piano--Mozart’s “Air in A, with Variations,” lies open on the
instrument. One after another she plays the lovely melodies, so simply,
so purely beautiful, of that unpretending and unrivaled work. At the
close of the ninth Variation (Clara’s favorite), she pauses, and turns
toward the garden.
“Shall I stop there?” she asks.
There is no answer. Has Clara wandered away out of hearing of the music
that she loves--the music that harmonizes so subtly with the tender
beauty of the night? Mrs. Crayford rises and advances to the window.
No! there is the white figure standing alone on the slope of the
lawn--the head turned away from the house; the face looking out over
the calm sea, whose gently rippling waters end in the dim line on the
horizon which is the line of the Hampshire coast.
Mrs. Crayford advances as far as the path before the window, and calls
to her.
“Clara!”
Again there is no answer. The white figure still stands immovably in its
place.
With signs of distress in her face, but with no appearance of alarm,
Mrs. Crayford returns to the room. Her own sad experience tells her what
has happened. She summons the servants and directs them to wait in the
drawing-room until she calls to them. This done, she returns to the
garden, and approaches the mysterious figure on the lawn.
Dead to the outer world, as if she lay already in her grave--insensible
to touch, insensible to sound, motionless as stone, cold as stone--Clara
stands on the moonlit lawn, facing the seaward view. Mrs. Crayford waits
at her side, patiently watching for the change which she knows is to
come. “Catalepsy,” as some call it--“hysteria,” as others say--this
alone is certain, the same interval always passes; the same change
always appears.
It comes now. Not a change in her eyes; they still remain wide open,
fixed and glassy. The first movement is a movement of her hands. They
rise slowly from her side and waver in the air like the hands of a
person groping in the dark. Another interval, and the movement spreads
to her lips: they part and tremble. A few minutes more, and words begin
to drop, one by one, from those parted lips--words spoken in a lost,
vacant tone, as if she is talking in her sleep.
Mrs. Crayford looks back at the house. Sad experience makes her
suspicious of the servants’ curiosity. Sad experience has long since
warned her that the servants are not to be trusted within hearing of
the wild words which Clara speaks in the trance. Has any one of them
ventured into the garden? No. They are out of hearing at the window,
waiting for the signal which tells them that their help is needed.
Turning toward Clara once more, Mrs. Crayford hears the vacantly uttered
words, falling faster and faster from her lips,
“Frank! Frank! Frank! Don’t drop behind--don’t trust Richard Wardour.
While you can stand, keep with the other men, Frank!”
(The farewell warning of Crayford in the solitudes of the Frozen Deep,
repeated by Clara in the garden of her English home!)
A moment of silence follows; and, in that moment, the vision has
changed. She sees him on the iceberg now, at the mercy of the bitterest
enemy he has on earth. She sees him drifting--over the black water,
through the ashy light.
“Wake, Frank! wake and defend yourself! Richard Wardour knows that
I love you--Richard Wardour’s vengeance will take your life! Wake,
Frank--wake! You are drifting to your death!” A low groan of horror
bursts from her, sinister and terrible to hear. “Drifting! drifting!”
she whispers to herself--“drifting to his death!”
Her glassy eyes suddenly soften--then close. A long shudder runs through
her. A faint flush shows itself on the deadly pallor of her face, and
fades again. Her limbs fail her. She sinks into Mrs. Crayford’s arms.
The servants, answering the call for help, carry her into the house.
They lay her insensible on her bed. After half an hour or more, her eyes
open again--this time with the light of life in them--open, and rest
languidly on the friend sitting by the bedside.
“I have had a dreadful dream,” she murmurs faintly. “Am I ill, Lucy? I
feel so weak.”
Even as she says the words, sleep, gentle, natural sleep, takes her
suddenly, as it takes young children weary with their play. Though it
is all over now, though no further watching is required, Mrs. Crayford
still keeps her place by the bedside, too anxious and too wakeful to
retire to her own room.
On other occasions, she is accustomed to dismiss from her mind the words
which drop from Clara in the trance. This time the effort to dismiss
them is beyond her power. The words haunt her. Vainly she recalls to
memory all that the doctors have said to her, in speaking of Clara in
the state of trance. “What she vaguely dreads for the lost man whom she
loves is mingled in her mind with what she is constantly reading, of
trials, dangers, and escapes in the Arctic seas. The most startling
things that she may say or do are all attributable to this cause, and
may all be explained in this way.” So the doctors have spoken; and, thus
far, Mrs. Crayford has shared their view. It is only to-night that the
girl’s words ring in her ear, with a strange prophetic sound in them.
It is only to-night that she asks herself: “Is Clara present, in the
spirit, with our loved and lost ones in the lonely North? Can mortal
vision see the dead and living in the solitudes of the Frozen Deep?”