Lost Sir Massingberd: A Romance of Real Life. v. 1/2 Page 4

  CHAPTER III.

  THE DREAM BY THE BROOK.

  Although my story must needs be sombre wherever it has to do with thatperson whose name it bears, yet I hope there will be found some sunnyspots 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 daysunder green leaves, and not only in a metaphorical sense; for every fineafternoon, immediately after study was over, I betook myself to thePark. The whole place was watched as zealously, even in summer, as thegardens of the Hesperides, but Mr. Long had obtained permission for meto roam at large therein. To me, vexed from childhood by Indian suns,Fairburn Chase--as that part of the demesne most remote from the Hallwas called--was far more delightful than it could have been to any mereEnglish boy. Its stately avenues of oaks, tapering into infinitedistance, with their checker work of beam and shade, was the realizationof my dreams of forest beauty. Nor was its delicious coolness marred bythe broad strips of sunlight, at long but equal distances, like thegolden stairs of the Angels' Ladder; for those, I knew, marked theinterlacing of "the Rides", themselves as fair, and leading, not as theavenue did, to the outer world, but into secret bowers known only to thedeer and me.

  When Marmaduke was not with me, which often enough happened, poorfellow, and particularly after that unfortunate meeting with his unclein the churchyard--the whole Chase seemed abandoned to myself. I daresay it was not really so, and that if I had not been a privileged personI should soon have found out my mistake, but for days and days I neversaw any human being there. Now and then the figure of a gamekeeper,dwarfed by distance, would make its appearance for a moment, to be lostthe next in some leafy glade. But the sense of solitude was therebyrather increased than otherwise, just as the poet tells us in a casewhere the ear and not the eye was concerned, "the busy woodpecker madestiller by his sound the inviolable quietness." Lying couched in fern,in that lordly pleasure-place, I have myself entertained some poeticthoughts, although they never found expression. Even now, as I shut myeyes, I make an inward picture of some such resting-place; nothing to beseen but the long green feathery stems which the summer air just stirsabout my brow, and the broad branches of the oak that stretch themselvesmotionless between me and the sun; nothing to be heard but the coo ofthe ring-dove, and the swift stealthy bite of the dappled deer. Nor didFairburn Chase lack water to complete its beauty. In front of the Hallitself moved a broad slow stream, which presently slid rather than felldown ledges of mossy stone into a wilderness of trees and shrubs,through which it wandered on like one who has lost his way, but singingblithely nevertheless. Another stream, which was my favourite, burstspring-like from the very heart of the Chase, having been artificiallyconveyed beneath the avenue, and ran quite a little river, and at agreat rate, to form the island where the herons lived; after which, asthough it had done its work, it went its way tranquilly enough: If ithad nothing to boast of but the heronry it might have been a proudlittle brook, for never did colony of those solemn birds take their sadpleasure in a more lovely spot; but besides it had a certain bend init--essential to the beauty of a brook as straightness is to that of atree--which I have never seen rivalled elsewhere. Its right bank rosethere, though not abruptly, and left half its bed of brown sand andloose tinkling shingle bare to the sunlight, save so much of it as theshade of a cluster of lime trees could cover. Here the bee and the birdbrought their songs, and the dragon-flies the glory of their turquoisearmour and glittering wings throughout the summer noons. The coolfragrant smell of the limes, and the drowsy music of the insects thathaunted them, were inexpressibly pleasant to me, who, I am afraid, hadnot a little of the Asiatic indolence in my nature. Sometimes a groupof swans sailed by on the unruffled stream, themselves a slumbrouspageant fit enough to herald sleep; but at all events, swans or noswans, I often did sleep there. One July afternoon, in particular, whenthe heat was almost as intense as at Calcutta, and no punkahs to coolone, I went to this place with malice prepense to lie there and donothing, which, from my youth up, has always been synonymous with asiesta. I cannot do absolutely nothing, and yet keep awake. I verymuch admire the people whom I often meet in railway carriages, whoendure, 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 intoa melody, or at least a whistle. They cannot possibly be thinking allthat time, and indeed they have no appearance of employing themselves inthat way, but "stare right on with calm eternal eyes," with no morespeculation in them than those of the sphinx herself. I envy, but Icannot imitate those happy persons. There is no such state of coma withme; 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 theglancing stream, with the grand old willow opposite, that bent its hoaryhonours half-way o'er, the scene dissolved and changed; the brook becamea river, and the willow a palm-tree, and the Chase a sandy tract, andthe 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, indreams--my father and my mother; but they passed by me with pitiful,loving looks, and went their way. Then the ayah, the black nurse whowas watching over me--for I was once more a child--stole down to theriver-brink, and drew a fluted dagger from her bosom, and dipped it inthe sacred flood, and I felt that I was to die. I knew her well; we twohad loved one another as nurse and child do love, where the nurseperforce takes half the mother's part; as the child grows up, hisaffection, at the best, congeals to gratitude; but not so with thebreast that suckled him--God forgive us men; and the pain of my dreamwas sharpest because it was my own dear ayah who was about to slay me. Ihad offended Vishnu, or else she would not have done it; her godsdemanded my life of her; but she was sorry; I felt her cold lips upon mybrow, and then a large round tear fell upon my cheek like icy hail, andI awoke. There was a tumult of sounds in the air; the birds, and thebees, and the bubbling wave, silent while I had slept, seemed to haveburst out together in chorus at my waking. I was bewildered, and knewnot where I was. My dream was more distinct at first than the realitiesabout me. If I had but closed my eyes again, I knew that it would becontinued at the spot where it had left off, that the fluted daggerwould have drunk my life-blood; and therefore I made an effort to rousemyself. Wondrous are dreams, and wondrous the borderland 'twixt life andsleep! If my existence had depended upon it, I could not, for someseconds, 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, withdrewreluctant from their usurped dominion over me. I remembered, however,most distinctly every incident that they had brought about, and Iplaced my hand mechanically upon my left cheek--I had been lying upon myright--upon which the tear had seemed to fall. Great Heaven, it wasstill wet! I was really startled. The cloudless sky forbade the idea ofa 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 droppedas it did, making a cool round spot in the centre of the cheek--it wouldhave slid down and left a little frigid line: there were no stones forthe stream to splash against and thus besprinkle me.

  It was very odd. Still, I did not imagine for a moment that my poorblack nurse had really come across the seas to drop the tributary tearupon her sleeping boy; moreover, she could scarcely have got away sosuddenly without leaving some trace of her departure, some...--My heartall of a sudden ceased to beat; a shiver ran through me, as runs fromstem to stern through a doomed ship that comes end on at speed upon asunken rock; my eyes had fallen--while I thus reasoned with myself--upona sight to terrify an older man than I, after such a dream; the printof a woman's bare feet in the sand. Had there been anyfootprints--those of a keeper or watcher, for instance--I should havebeen startled to know that some one had passed by while I slumbered, formost certainly the sand had been untrodden up to the moment I had lostconsciousness; but that a woman with naked feet had been really pr
esentwhile I dreamed that horrible dream, was something more than startling.In Scotland such a circumstance would have been less remarkable, but inFairburn I had not yet seen any person without shoes. There were aconsiderable number of footprints, but only of one individual: she hadstood beside me for some time, for they were deeper close to the placewhere I had lain, and there was also one impression there which lookedas though the mysterious visitor had knelt. They had come and returnedthe same way, which was not the one that I had come myself, and theybegan and ended at the stream-side a few yards beyond, and out of sightof the bend which was my favourite haunt. The woman had doubtlesscrossed and recrossed by means of some natural stepping-stones thatshowed their heads above water; there was no path on the other side, butonly a tangled thicket, through which it would have been impossible totrack her, even had I been so disposed, which I was not. To say truth, Iwas terribly discomposed. For a minute or two I clung to the notion thatthe footprints were my own, made, perhaps, under the influence ofsomnambulism. I took off my shoes, and measured the tracks with my ownfeet, but I found, boy as I was, that mine effaced them. They werecertainly the marks of a woman; smaller than those of a grown male, yetfirmer set than those of a child. Never since the days of RobinsonCrusoe 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, Ifairly trembled. The many evil stories which, during my short stay atFairburn, I had already heard of the old Hall, a corner of which I coulddiscern from where I stood, crowded in upon my brain; the whole demesneseemed under a malign influence--enchanted ground. I turned from thespot, whose lonely beauty had once so won my soul, with fear andloathing; and as I turned, there rang out--it may have been from thethicket across the stream, but the echoes took it up so suddenly, thatit seemed to ring all around me--a laugh so terrible, so demoniacallymocking, that I could scarcely believe it came from mortal throat. Againand again it rose, and circled about, as though it would have headed myfleeing steps, and driven me back upon some dreadful Thing, while I fledthrough the fern towards home at my topmost speed, and the white-tailedrabbits scampered to left and right, less frightened than I.