HER DREAM.
He left the station as in a trance. He felt nothing but that something
had happened to him that had mortally wounded him.
Mechanically, he got rid of Ralph’s companionship by leaving him at the
scientist’s house. Then he gave the order “Home.”
He was going up the steps of his house when the door opened, and the
count came out.
“Ah!” The count’s exclamation was one of satisfaction.
“But I am glad to find you, monsieur le docteur! The prince is terribly
anxious about madame! She is very ill. You will come to her at once?”
The revulsion of feeling was acute. The blood rushed to Dr. Paull’s
cheek. He turned abruptly from the count, and opened the street door
with his key.
“Will you come in?” he said coldly.
At that moment some instinct suggested aversion to this man. He had met
those seraphic blue eyes fixed upon him with a mocking expression that
was anything but seraphic, and in his present humour he would have
doubted anyone.
“I understood that the prince had left town,” he said, after he had led
the way into the library and closed the door. “Was it he who sent you,
or the princess?”
The count explained that the princess was too ill to give directions,
and was proceeding to make further explanations when Hugh cut him short,
and explained that the princess having dismissed him, he could attend at
her summons alone.
He was desperately angry—was it with Mercedes, or with himself? This
anger nerved him to write the names and addresses of certain physicians
and to hand them to the count.
“Any of these gentlemen will attend at the prince’s request,” he said.
“Under the circumstances, you will quite understand that it is
impossible for me to do so except at the princess’ special desire.”
The count was compelled to retreat. He was surprised. Perhaps he had
expected that Hugh had only to hear that he was wanted by his beautiful
patient to fly to her.
During that short interview Hugh felt triumphant. No sooner was he alone
than the agreeable sense of self-vindication fled. He began to doubt
whether he had acted rightly.
“I have been selfish—hard,” he told himself. “I ought to have remembered
what a child she is—and so tender and sensitive—and so utterly
friendless, with that man for a husband, and that fellow for a
go-between!”
However, he had no time for further self-reproach. Patients arrived and
had to be interviewed. Later in the day he had to visit a hospital, and
in the evening Ralph was full of his day’s work. He had written a
chapter at the professor’s dictation which had opened out a new vista of
science to him. As the boy sat eagerly expatiating upon his day’s
experiences, his flushed cheek and glistening eyes made him strangely
like his dead mother. As Dr. Paull noticed the likeness he shuddered. As
soon as he could, he made an excuse to be alone.
“I have work to do—can you amuse yourself without me?” he said.
Ralph’s affectionate glance recalled Lilia still more. Was it his fancy
that to-night, of all nights, the lad bore a startling resemblance to
his mother that Hugh had not observed before?
“It is not,” he thought, as he lowered the lamp in the library, and
opening the window, drew an easy-chair near it and lighting his pipe,
settled himself to think. “He is growing like her.”
It was a dark night—moonless, but clear. The stars were brilliant.
Obscurity lent a charm to the blackened shrubs in the so-called gardens
at the back of the house. The forms of the opposite houses were vaguely
defined against the ebon blue. Hugh tried to recall nights such as this,
when he and his wife strolled into the pinewoods, and Lilia talked love
to him as she leant upon his arm. He tried to recall the tones of her
voice, but could not. He tried to remember the expression of her eyes,
but, to his horror—for to-day he would have sacrificed much for a keen
recollection of the past—when he thought of Lilia’s face, he seemed to
see the pathetic beauty of Mercedes; when he thought of Lilia’s voice,
he seemed to hear Mercedes when she last spoke to him.
“I am a fickle wretch!” he told himself, bitterly. “I have forgotten the
child who loved me better than she loved her God!”
He was attempting to do what he had never since dared to attempt—to
recall in all its torturing details the closing rebellious scene of
Lilia’s short life—when he heard a tap at the door, and “May I come in?”
in Ralph’s familiar tones.
He laid down his pipe with a sigh, and went to the door. He would send
Ralph away—he was not in a humour to talk.
On opening the door, he saw Ralph—and two women, one of whom turned to
her companion and said a few words in a low voice, then coolly passed
him and walked into his room.
He recognised her at once, cloaked and veiled though she was. Still, he
stood at the door, hesitating; his heart seemed to stand still at such
unparalleled audacity. Only when, removing her veil, she said, almost
impatiently, “Please shut the door,” did he seem to recover the right
use of his senses.
“I thought—you were very ill,” he said, coming towards her.
“I am,” said Mercedes, throwing up her veil.
She certainly looked like death: her face pallid, her features sunken,
her great eyes dimmed.
“This is terrible—you should not have come!” said Hugh, passionately,
stirred by the sight of the face which had bewitched him, bereft of its
exquisite beauty. “This is worse than imprudence!”
He drew a chair for her near the writing-table, turned up the lamp, and
pulled down the blind, half indignant that his love—oh! when he saw her
he felt she was his love, and nothing else—that this cruel love of his,
who had caused him such throes, should have lowered herself thus, and
have forgotten her high estate and womanly dignity to come to him! But
half despairing—for he saw nothing but an abyss—an abyss of shame for
her, of dishonour for him, in this.
“_Why_ did you come?” he asked her, when his emotion permitted him to
think. “It is madness—madness—for you to come here! And at this hour!”
“Why did you not come—to me?” she gasped, rising in her chair. “My
husband sent for you—and you would not come!”
“You wrote me my dismissal,” said Hugh, bitterly. “You felt a whim, a
fancy, not to see me any more. You gratified it. You did not think what
suffering it would cause me. You only pleased your vanity. It pleased
your vanity to think you could hurt a man who has not been hurt by a
woman before.”
He stopped short, for a sudden light came upon her face.
“What?” she whispered, leaning forward, her features losing their
contraction, her pallor lessening. “No woman _hurt_ you before! I was
told you loved your wife!”
She said the word “wife” reluctantly. Hugh gazed at her wonderingly. His
eyes travelled eagerly over her countenance. Every line was dear to him.
The dimples about her mouth—how sweet they were!
But suddenly he remembered himself—his position—and her, his patient. He
recalled himself to a sense of propriety, and assumed a calm which he
did not feel.
“I was very sorry to receive your dismissal,” he began, in as ordinary a
tone of voice as he could command, leaning up against the book-shelves
in the shadow opposite to her, and folding his arms with a vague
instinct to repress the turbulent beating of his heart. “But I am still
more sorry that you, princess, should have stooped to come to me.”
Then he tried to explain why he had not gone to her at the count’s
bidding. He spoke of professional etiquette, of the duty imposed upon
members of his craft to support the rules that upheld their dignity. She
leant back in her chair listening, with a curious smile on her pale
lips.
He spoke confidently at first; indeed, almost with firmness. But as he
looked at her, sitting like some exquisite waxen figure in the old
leathern chair, a delicacy and royal daintiness about her, even to every
fold of her glistening evening gown, her eyes fixed upon him with an
expression of sad reproach, faintly tinged with disdain, he felt a wild
impulse to throw himself at her feet and tell her he was hers—her slave,
to be hers till death. Astonished at his own feelings—alarmed,—he
violently repressed them; but his voice first faltered, then lost its
resonance; he stammered, forgot what he wanted to say; in fact, failed
miserably in his attempt to assert himself. He was thankful to her when
she spoke, although she reproached him.
“You were not only my _docteur_,” she said, and her sweet, reproachful
voice seemed dearer, more familiar, than before. “You said—you promised
to be my friend.”
“Friendship cannot be all on one side,” said Hugh bitterly,
relinquishing the pretence of doctor speaking to patient. “You told me
you did not want me. You wrote as cruelly as ever woman wrote to man. I
could not believe in your wish for my friendship after that.”
She looked at him, surprised.
“Think,” she said; “remember, remember! How did you be to me that
night—that night at Lady Boisville’s? The good count he did come
afterwards to console me. He said to me, ‘Excuse him, because he is so
clever a man, and he understands _les nerfs_ as no other man does
understand them.’ Then he tells me more——”
“The count is extremely kind,” said Hugh. “He appears to know me very
well. And pray what more did the count tell you about me?”
“He tells me” (she closed her eyes and spoke with hesitation and in a
stifled voice) “how beautiful was your young wife, and how your poor
heart is buried in her grave.”
There was silence in the big, shabby old room, where the Princess
Andriocchi, seated in the lamplight, was the spot of light among the
shadows. The princess had not spoken mockingly; she spoke like a true
woman, sympathetically, although a cool listener would have gathered
from her tone and manner how deeply she loved the man to whom she
addressed those words.
But Hugh was no cool listener; he was excited to the utmost pitch,
beyond the point where he could recognise that he was not himself.
“That is true in a way,” he said, roughly, with a half laugh. “It is
true as far as this: if I had a heart, it might be buried in a grave.
But I have none, princess. All women and men are alike to me. If they
are ill and want me, then, of course, they are my patients, and I am
interested in them as such. Otherwise—well, I wish good to everyone; but
I am content to live alone—aye, and to die alone.”
He had paced the room while venting that speech. Turning abruptly, as he
somewhat savagely enunciated those last words, he saw a smile on
Mercedes’ sweet face.
“Ah!” she said, shaking her head, “you think you feel that. But——”
She looked incredulity. He and his sentiments had evidently not
impressed her or depressed her spirits in the least. On the contrary,
she looked far more human, far better in a physiological sense, than
when she first came into the room.
“How good it is to be here!” she said, almost ecstatically, glancing
above at the dingy ceiling, and around at the rows of book-shelves
filled with plain bound volumes. “How much good it does me to be here!”
and she heaved a sigh, a sigh of relief and contentment, sinking back in
the old chair.
There was so true a ring in her voice, such a reality about her, that
Dr. Paull was subdued by a sense of awe, or the beginning of awe. The
situation was unnatural, yet Mercedes, more than at her ease, was making
him feel as if it were not only natural that he and she should be here
alone together thus, but even right and proper.
She was evidently completely at her ease. While he stood uncomfortably
wondering what he should do or say next, she promptly solved the
difficulty.
“Come here,” she said, not exactly with imperiousness, but certainly
with the confidence of one in command. “Come here” (she drew one of the
chairs near her own), “and I will tell you—all.”
He hesitated for a moment. A disagreeable feeling that some shock was
awaiting him in this threatened revelation made him almost inclined to
refuse to hear it, now and for always.
What if he had refused? What if he had left her there and then,
unconfessed of her secret, whatever it might be? Would it have changed
his after life? would it have averted his fate? Often afterwards he
asked himself this question, in wonder, in awe: that question which none
on earth could answer.
He did not refuse. He seated himself by her, and said:
“You are mysterious.”
“Yes,” she said, simply. “It is all a dreadful mystery. You know, every
time I have seen you, you have made me feel stronger. That is why I ask
you to see me for five days, and then I tell you all! I tell you—you
will be frightened when you hear what I have to say!”
There was no lightness about her voice and manner. Indeed, she spoke
with reluctance, almost with pain.
“I do not think there is much which can frighten me now,” said Hugh,
reassuringly. “You can tell me everything, anything you please.”
A nervous tremor shook her whole frame.
“I _will_ tell you,” she said, almost convulsively. “I dreamed a dream
once, when I was a child. I was sitting on a stone bench, such as we
have in our country. But round me were dark trees, dark bushes of the
sort we do not have there. It was dark. I dreamed I was in the
expectation of some one to come to me. I was sitting there, waiting.
Then I saw the moon, and just as I saw the moon, I saw some one who
came—a man; and I knew that the man was the one I loved before
everything, and as I did not love anyone else.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, encouragingly.
The words brought back some unpleasantly suggestive recollection, but
indistinctly.
“I woke from that dream,” she went on, musingly; “and I knew it was not
like other dreams. I knew that it meant something. I had been not fond
of people like my girl friends were fond of people; but that man, oh! I
loved _him_!”
“Did you recognise him?” asked Dr. Paull, feeling uncomfortable, he
hardly knew why.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, “not _then_.... I will tell you. I did not dream that
dream again. It made me think; I told my confessor. It was not like
other dreams. If ever I see the place I shall know it; of that I am
sure.”
“And the man?” asked Hugh.
“I did not see his face,” she went on. “Only from what I felt did I
guess him to be the same.”
“As what?” His heart beat quick.
“As the man of the dreams which made me so—so unhappy.”
She spoke almost piteously.
“And what were they?” asked Hugh.
Pale as she had been when she came, she grew paler still.
“They,” she said, in a hushed voice, “they were many, many; time after
time, but always the same dream.” She paused, drew a sobbing breath,
then went on: “It was of a room. At first when I had the dream I could
only notice that it was a room with a table, all the other was dark. But
two things I could see quite plain: one was a _pistolet_ lying upon the
table, the other was a man sitting like this.” (She leaned her arms upon
the table and buried her face in her hands.) “And I—I, even in the
dream, wanted that man to kill himself! yes, to take that pistol and
shoot himself! Ah! monsieur!” she started and exclaimed. Hugh had
uttered an exclamation.
“I said I should frighten you!” she said, sinking back and looking at
him concerned.
He was pale to lividity, but, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, he once
more folded his arms, and said, coolly:
“Go on. Did the gentleman of your dream take your advice?”
“You must not mock or sneer,” she said, somewhat defiantly. “Monsieur, I
do not think you should sneer at my suffering! I have been in torment
with that dream; when I woke up I have felt that I was wicked, just as
if it were the truth. I have cried and groaned. Oh! I have prayed to
die!”
“Sneer? I wish I _could_ sneer!” said Hugh, bitterly.
She fixed her eyes upon him, seriously, earnestly; then went on:
“After I had that dream many times each year, I see that room plainer.
It is a room” (she stopped and looked round) “something like this. Books
everywhere, on the walls like those, on the table. But while I dream
that I ask that man—I beg him, indeed, more and more each time—to kill
himself, never once in all those years did he move or look at me; never
once did I see his face!”
Hugh could not speak; he was dumb with horror. He could not doubt that
this dream of Mercedes’ was a dream of the terrible crisis in his life;
of that hour when Lilia had, dying, tempted him to commit self-murder,
and he had been saved from the crime by the accidental appearance of
Mrs. Mervyn. But why should this Spanish girl have dreamt of him
throughout her young life, far away in a foreign land? Could it be—but
of course it must be—a coincidence? The thought of a coincidence was a
relief.
“Dreams are strange things,” he stammered. “Go on, you interest me
much!” (Interest him—good God!)
“Then,” she said, “came the strangest thing of all. When I was away in
the country I dreamed that—once more. But it was more like real life
than before; the room, oh! I saw it plain, even as I see this now. But
the man—this time he looked at me—and—it was _you_!”
He did not speak. He did not think. It seemed as if his whole life had
come to a halt.
It was Mercedes who spoke first. She had watched him wonderingly after
her revelation. His dark face, stern and set, told her nothing.
“What—you think about it?” she said, at last. Her voice made him shiver
like the touch of cold steel before the cut.
“I? I do not know,” he stammered. “Of course, it all seems very strange
to you. But you must not think about it.”
In his perturbation, the instinct to protect this weak woman, who by
some law not understood by science had suffered in dreams on his
account, mastered all selfish emotion.
“I assure you,” he said, with a valiant attempt at a smile, “that the
best thing you can do is to forget all about these dreams. I will give
you a book about dreams, a book dry and hard to read perhaps, but which
will make you feel happier on the subject.”
“But”—she began—“why—why—should I like _you_ so much—why should the man
of my dream be _you_?”
How could the wife of Prince Andriocchi and the constant companion of
his friend the count, contrive, being no actress, to look into his face
with infantine innocence as Mercedes looked now? That look made him
think better of those two men.
“That—belongs to a branch of a subject I have not studied,” he said,
hoping she did not notice the guilty flush which suddenly rose to his
face. “I will think over all you have said to me to-night, and will tell
you my opinion next time I see you,” he added, rising.
“Oh!” She looked disappointed. “When—when will that be?” She spoke
anxiously. “You see how well being with you makes me! Let it be soon!”
she urged.
What was he to say? To follow the promptings of his passionate feeling
for her would have been madness. No, no; duty, duty alone——
That pause of a few seconds when he summoned all his force to subdue
himself, a pause which seemed to him hideously long, was broken by a
neighbouring, a friendly church clock, which struck ten.
“Do you hear?” he exclaimed, seeming to be horrified although nothing
could have horrified him just then. He sprang up. “I had no idea it was
this hour,” he said, truthfully enough. “Have you your carriage? Who was
that with you?”
“My maid,” she said. “Emma—a German. Lady Boisville sent her to me. Such
a kind person!”
“But your carriage?” he asked, anxiously. It was farthest from his
thoughts to compromise her.
“It is there,” she added, with a certain assertion of dignity, rising.
“Perhaps you will tell—that I am coming?”
Hugh hastened to the door and called “Ralph.” A voice from the
dining-room answered “Yes,” and Ralph came hurrying to the door.
“Where is the princess’ maid?” asked his father, as coldly as he could.
“She has been sitting in the dining-room with me, father.”
“That was right. Call up the carriage yourself, will you? Don’t bother
Jones.”
“Yes.”
Hugh returned to the room. She was standing thoughtfully at the table.
What should he say to her? As he stood undecided, Ralph came hurrying
back; he ceremoniously offered her his arm, and presently he was
standing alone on the pavement, the stars shining mockingly down upon
him as he gazed after her departing carriage.