I have got over it; we have both got over it tolerably, creditably;
but after all, it is a much severer ordeal for a man than a woman,
who, with a bouquet to occupy her hands, and a veil to gently shroud
her features, need merely be prettily passive. I am alluding, I need
hardly say, to the religious ceremony of marriage, which I flatter
myself I have gone through with a stiff sheepishness not unworthy of
my country. It is a three-days-old event now, and we are getting used
to belonging to one another, though Elizabeth still takes off her
ring twenty times a day to admire its bright thickness; still laughs
when she hears herself called “Madame.” Three days ago, we kissed all
our friends, and left them to make themselves ill on our cake, and
criticise our bridal behaviour, and now we are at Brussels, she and I,
feeling oddly, joyfully free from any chaperone. We have been mildly
sight-seeing--very mildly, most people would say, but we have resolved
not to take our pleasure with the railway speed of Americans, or the
hasty sadness of our fellow Britons. Slowly and gaily we have been
taking ours. To-day we have been to visit Wiertz’s pictures. Have you
ever seen them, oh reader? They are known to comparatively few people,
but if you have a taste for the unearthly terrible--if you wish to
sup full of horrors, hasten thither. We have been peering through the
appointed peep-hole at the horrible cholera picture--the man buried
alive by mistake, pushing up the lid of his coffin, and stretching
a ghastly face and livid hands out of his winding sheet towards you,
while awful grey-blue coffins are piled around, and noisome toads and
giant spiders crawl damply about. On first seeing it, I have reproached
myself for bringing one of so nervous a temperament as Elizabeth to see
so haunting and hideous a spectacle; but she is less impressed than I
expected--less impressed than I myself am.
“He is very lucky to be able to get his lid up,” she says, with a
half-laugh; “we should find it hard work to burst our brass nails,
should not we? When you bury me, dear, fasten me down very slightly, in
case there may be some mistake.”
And now all the long and quiet July evening we have been prowling
together about the streets. Brussels is the town of towns for
_flâner_-ing--have been flattening our noses against the shop windows,
and making each other imaginary presents. Elizabeth has not confined
herself to imagination, however; she has made me buy her a little
bonnet with feathers--“in order to look married,” as she says, and the
result is such a delicious picture of a child playing at being grown
up, having practised a theft on its mother’s wardrobe, that for the
last two hours I have been in a foolish ecstasy of love and laughter
over her and it. We are at the “Bellevue,” and have a fine suite of
rooms, _au premier_, evidently specially devoted to the English, to
the gratification of whose well-known loyalty the Prince and Princess
of Wales are simpering from the walls. Is there any one in the three
kingdoms who knows his own face as well as he knows the faces of
Albert Victor and Alexandra? The long evening has at last slidden
into night--night far advanced--night melting into earliest day. All
Brussels is asleep. One moment ago I also was asleep, soundly as any
log. What is it that has made me take this sudden, headlong plunge
out of sleep into wakefulness? Who is it that is clutching at and
calling upon me? What is it that is making me struggle mistily up into
a sitting posture, and try to revive my sleep-numbed senses? A summer
night is never wholly dark; by the half light that steals through the
closed _persiennes_ and open windows I see my wife standing beside
my bed; the extremity of terror on her face, and her fingers digging
themselves with painful tenacity into my arm.
“Tighter, tighter!” she is crying, wildly. “What are you thinking of?
You are letting me go!”
“Good heavens!” say I, rubbing my eyes, while my muddy brain grows
a trifle clearer. “What is it? What has happened? Have you had a
nightmare?”
“You saw him,” she says, with a sort of sobbing breathlessness; “you
know you did! You saw him as well as I.”
“I!” cry I, incredulously--“not I. Till this second I have been fast
asleep. _I_ saw nothing.”
“You did!” she cries, passionately. “You know you did. Why do you deny
it? You were as frightened as I?”
“As I live,” I answer, solemnly, “I know no more than the dead what you
are talking about; till you woke me by calling me and catching hold of
me, I was as sound asleep as the seven sleepers.”
“Is it possible that it can have been a _dream_?” she says, with a
long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her
hands. “But no--in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was
here--_here_--on that bed, and he stood _there_,” pointing with her
forefinger, “just _there_, between the foot of it and the window!”
She stops, panting.
“It is all that brute Wiertz,” say I, in a fury. “I wish I had been
buried alive myself, before I had been fool enough to take you to see
his beastly daubs.”
“Light a candle,” she says, in the same breathless way, her teeth
chattering with fright. “Let us make sure that he is not hidden
somewhere in the room.”
“How could he be?” say I, striking a match; “the door is locked.”
“He might have got in by the balcony,” she answers, still trembling
violently.
“He would have had to have cut a very large hole in the _persiennes_,”
say I, half-mockingly. “See, they are intact and well fastened on the
inside.”
She sinks into an arm-chair, and pushes her loose soft hair from her
white face.
“It _was_ a dream then, I suppose?”
She is silent for a moment or two, while I bring her a glass of water,
and throw a dressing-gown round her cold and shrinking form.
“Now tell me, my little one,” I say, coaxingly, sitting down at her
feet, “what it was--what you thought you saw?”
“_Thought_ I saw!” echoes she, with indignant emphasis, sitting
upright, while her eyes sparkle feverishly. “I am as certain that I saw
him standing there as I am that I see that candle burning--that I see
this chair--that I see you.”
“_Him!_ but who is _him_?”
She falls forward on my neck, and buries her face in my shoulder.
“That--dreadful--man!” she says, while her whole body is one tremor.
“_What_ dreadful man?” cry I, impatiently.
She is silent.
“Who was he?”
“I do not know.”
“Did you ever see him before?”
“Oh, no--no, never! I hope to God I may never see him again!”
“What was he like?”
“Come closer to me,” she says, laying hold of my hand with her small
and chilly fingers; “stay _quite_ near me, and I will tell you,”--after
a pause--“he had a _nose_!”
“My dear soul,” cry I, bursting out with a loud laugh in the silence of
the night, “do not most people have noses? Would not he have been much
more dreadful if he had had _none_?”
“But it was _such_ a nose!” she says, with perfect trembling gravity.
“A bottle nose?” suggest I, still cackling.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t laugh!” she says, nervously; “if you had seen
his face, you would have been as little disposed to laugh as I.”
“But his nose?” return I, suppressing my merriment; “what kind of nose
was it? See, I am as grave as a judge.”
“It was very prominent,” she answers, in a sort of awe-struck
half-whisper, “and very sharply chiselled; the nostrils very much cut
out.” A little pause. “His eyebrows were one straight black line across
his face, and under them his eyes burnt like dull coals of fire, that
shone and yet did not shine; they looked like dead eyes, sunken, half
extinguished, and yet sinister.”
“And what did he do?” ask I, impressed, despite myself, by her
passionate earnestness; “when did you first see him?”
“I was asleep,” she said--“at least I thought so--and suddenly I opened
my eyes, and he was _there_--_there_”--pointing again with trembling
finger--“between the window and the bed.”
“What was he doing? Was he walking about?”
“He was standing as still as stone--I never saw any live thing so
still--_looking_ at me; he never called or beckoned, or moved a
finger, but his eyes _commanded_ me to come to him, as the eyes of the
mesmeriser at Penrith did.” She stops, breathing heavily. I can hear
her heart’s loud and rapid beats.
“And you?” I say, pressing her more closely to my side, and smoothing
her troubled hair.
“I _hated_ it,” she cries, excitedly; “I loathed it--abhorred it. I was
ice-cold with fear and horror, but--I _felt_ myself going to him.”
“Yes?”
“And then I shrieked out to you, and you came running, and caught fast
hold of me, and held me tight at first--quite tight--but presently
I felt your hold slacken--slacken--and though I _longed_ to stay
with you, though I was _mad_ with fright, yet I felt myself pulling
strongly away from you--going to him; and he--he stood there always
looking--looking--and then I gave one last loud shriek, and I suppose I
awoke--and it was a dream!”
“I never heard of a clearer case of nightmare,” say I, stoutly; “that
vile Wiertz! I should like to see his whole _Musée_ burnt by the hands
of the hangman to-morrow.”
She shakes her head. “It had nothing to say to Wiertz; what it meant I
do not know, but----”
“It meant nothing,” I answer, reassuringly, “except that for the future
we will go and see none but good and pleasant sights, and steer clear
of charnel-house fancies.”