“Her Dreamland Tryst"

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVII, Issue 3, 21 July 1906, Page 50

“Her Dreamland Tryst"

By

Hallie Erminie Rives

TELL me you care nothing for tne,” he said, “and I will go away and never trouble you again.” fihe turned her head towards him. In the early moonlight he could see the shining track of a tear on her cheek, and her fingers plucking at the wisps of beard-grass that tufted the dry lake-margin on which they sat. Her eyes were only half open, and their violet depths were mazed with a terror that made his heart suddenly contract. “No, no!” she breathed. , “You do love me!” he bornly, an edge of masculine resentment rasping his tone. “You do! I’m not mistaken. Do you think I don’t know? Before I went on that confounded trip to Egypt in Burlingame’s yacht a year ago ” ■ • “Dont. Oh, don’t!” She put -out her hands weakly, and he caught one of them with a straining impetuousness and bent his lips to it. “I shall say it! Y’ou kissed me then here in Del Monte, in this very spot, with the moon yonder shining on the water. Y’ou kissed me! Didn’t you love me then? Or was it only ” He half choked; but he felt the slim hand he held grow less forbidingly rigid in his clasp. “I was such an inglorious coward, and the money wasn’t mine, and I had no prospects, and I—oh, I wanted, when I asked you to marry me, to have something decently tangible to offer you! But yon knew I meant it; yoa knew I would come, back to say it. You couldn’t have misjudged me that way; for I wasn’t that sort. There has never been anybody else with me. And you have admitted that there is no one else with you. And yet you won’t marry me!” His voice broke off with something like a groan. He dropped her yielding fingers, and his chin sunk dejectedly in his hands. The gaze she turned to his dejected posture was very soft, now that he could not see it. Her eyes were luminous as fire-opals, and her lips were tremulous and tender. The hushed whispers of tropical fir and palm,* and the pale scent of exotie California blossoms seemed to cling about her like a caress. He looked up suddenly and felt the full measure of her regard. Even in the dim light she could see the tinge that leaped to his cheek. “Jessica, Jessica!” he besought, “what is this thing that has come between us? Tell me, dear, please. Can’t you?” Again she had averted her head, again her fingers plucked at the tapery grass spears in a nervous trepidation. Y’ou—wouldn't understand.” Tie moved closer to her on the moss. “Try me.” ’.’Y’ou ’ wouldn’t, you wouldn't!” she cried. “Nobody would. I feel it’s irrational. absurd, and yet —and yet—oh,” she finished miserably, “I ean’t shake it off, and I don’t want to! And the worst of it is. I ean’t exlpain to anybody. I tried once to tell a woman, and she advised me to see Dr. Holbrook. She tfilnks now that I am queer’; I see it in her eyes whenever she looks at me.” It was a sorely puzzled countenance she saw now in the moonbeams; but it was grave enough. “Y’ou mean there is something in your thoughts that forbid you to marry me?” “Yes.” The acquiescence was faint; and troubled. “Forbids you to marry anyone A shake of the auburn head; 1 “The trouble _ seems 'to be*my own personality, then,” he said with a shade of bitterness. “Have I altered, so? Do I disappoint, your broadening ideals?” “No, no!” The denial w-as tenses and eager, and he took courage. ,‘fYon love no one else, yet. Do; you imagine you may come to love some one liner

No answer. He winced as he saw the quick interlocking of her fingers. “Some one you know?” Site shook her head. “Some one you have seen?” “No—yes—no—ah, don’t ask me! Don’t you see I am unreasonable and contradictory and queer?” She laughed now, a sad, unmirthful little laugh. He paid no heed to her vehemence. “Y’ou have seen him, and yet you haven't seen him,” he went on slowly. “I used to think the terms mutually selfexclusive. Perhaps they are not. Come, now. Y’ou know that if I thought there was a well-grounded reason for your determination, I would put the whole round world between us before I would trouble you with a word, but somehow, I can't think so. Y’ou see, this means so terribly much to me. Isn’t it some shadowy self-deeep-tion you are nursing? Aren’t you dreaming something that doesn’t really exist at all?” “ That is what I thought at first,” she said in a muffled voice, “ ■ —that it had no real existence—but when I dreamed it again—” she stopped, startled at the involuntary confession. A note of almost laughter bubbled in his voice, the relief was so substantial. “So it was a dream, a real dream! And do you think such an airy fabric can shipwreck me? I love you Jessica. I love you! And lam fiesh and blood. Kiss me, as you did that night so long ago, here in the moonlight!” . His masterful arms had drawn her elose; his rough tweed jacket seemed to burn her cheek. She knew that she was yielding, yielding with a sweet consent, while the trouble in her brain crept back a pace. She felt her face lifted to his, and their lips clung into a kiss. Joy pierced her like a spear of desperate gladness, and the sigh of the firs and the lap of the lilied water seemed to be choking all her senses with a new and sufficient melody. “Do you doubt still?” he asked presently, softly. Her brown head stirred against his arm. “ Now I want nothing but you—only you! It has always been so—since that night, here. When lam awake, it has never been different. But—” “The dream?” “ In the dream I felt the same way—all of it, all of it! Y’ou were not in my thought at all. Don’t you understand? I loved the one in my dream. I wanted nothing on earth so much as to touch him —to hold him. I would have died for him! I still love the very memory of it. I can’t help it. And often and often I fall asleep in dread and terror of its coming.” The man’s arms had slowly released her as she spoke. Now he leaned his resolute ehin in his palm and gazed out across the misty water, where a belated water-fowl paddled, a shining arrow of silver wake, to its nest under some leaning clay-bank. His brows had puckered painfully at the tremor of feeling in the girl’s voice; but his own still strove for an affected lightness. “Yet, if the very memory of the dream is so pleasurable. why do you dread it?” “Because, each time he—it has been a dream of danger. When it comes, it is just as if he was calling me in some voice I have sometime known and —and loved, calling me to’ come. And each time I go, and see him in his extremity, and eannot help him! I try—oh, how I try!—and I wake up crying and trembling. I tell myself that it is only a dream; but in my dream I know that it is true—the danger, I mean, and my love. I know it. It is not like other dreams; while I am dreaming it, I realise the difference very well.” -< She had clasped her fingers over her knee. The passion now had faded from

her face, yet her eyes were bright with’ a sort of solder seriousness. An irritant pity stung him —a compassion that cradled iu its core a rankling barb of self-hurt. “Let us consider the case judicially,” he said, after a pause. “M hen was your first experience of this kind ?” “Last November, on father’s birthday. I remembered it by that.” “November,” he repeated. “My rival took his good advantage. I was far enough away, at least; somewhere on the Barbary coast, if I remember. And when was the next?” “It was on the twelfth of February. I shall never forget that date. . It was the night your letter arrived —the one written when you were in the Mediterranean. I fell asleep thinking of that, and of that last evening here at Del Monte. Then—it came! It was much more terrible than the first. I was ill for days afterward.” He could see that she was trembling. His man’s cerebral impatience at the fanciful and irrational was gripping him hard; but he crushed it down, and his tone was even, as he said: ‘‘Dear, don’t you see that this is a fantastic and intolerable situation? that it hasn’t any basis in logic or fact? Y’ou’re over-imaginative, and you’.ve been brooding too much. Surely our dreams aren’t given us to build our lives upon! Y’ou love me, and I’m satisfactorily tangible? a being with, a briar pipe and a wholesome appetite, I don’t sail on a cloud—l drive a motor car. You can’t be in love with a dream-man. lYhy, it’s unthinkable! I presume he is handsome,” he added. But the playful irony missed its answering smile. “Is have never seen his face,” she said soberly. “It was always turned away, or in the shadow. But I didn’t need to see his face. I knew that the form I saw was the only one that existed for me in all the world.” “Yet you love me,” he continued, with stubborn persistence. “And I am here, and the other one isn’t. I hold the nine points. I’ll guarantee he won’t call again with me in possession.” “But he may,” she said, in a panging revulsion. “The dream may come again now—while you are here. It was a hundred times nearer and stronger the second time—the love, I mean. Y’ou have just kissed me; but suppose it came again to-night. Don’t you see? Ah, don’t you see?” She ~ stopped abruptly; but he did not speak. “Y’ou needn’t say it,” she added with a tremulous smile. “Say what?” “What you are thinking; that I ought to see Dr. Holbrook.” “Dearest!” he said. “Medical science teaches that such things are the results purely of physical condition. If your symptoms were real waking hallucinations, there might be cause for worry. But yours are bona fide dreams —vivid ones, I admit, from their immense effect on your mind, but still only dreams. We should be able to take care of them without much trouble. Let me be physician. Give me the whole story, at any rate. Begin at the beginning and tell me all you can recall of the first dream. Won’t you? Anything that touches your love, concerns me no less than yourself. Don't you realise that it does?” She was silent for awhile, and he waited. When she began, her eyes ■were on the water, where a fairy mist* lights as a spiderfs gossamer, was beginning to wreathe among the rushes. From the slope of lawn behind them, whence, from between the cypresses, sparkled the lights of the great hotel, came the throb of a motor car and mingled voices; but there was no hear sound save the myriad insect chirp of

the thicket, and the rustle of breezebent boughs. ' ' “It was on the third of November, ehe said, “in the afternoon. It had been very warm, and I had golfed that morning and was tired. But it was too nice weather to waste indoors, so • I carried a book down to the magnoliawalk. I sat at the very end, by one of the little wieker tables. The stoiy was dull, and that and the smell of the magnolias (you know how I love them) made me drowsy. I fell fast asleep, with my arms crossed on the table, and my head upon them. I dreamed other things first—it was in one of these dreams that I heard the calling, and knew that I must go.” “(Jo where?” he interrupted. “1 didn't know. But I left that dream immediately and went. it seemed not to be difficult at all. It was most like the shifting, on the canva •> of one stereoptieon slide into another, where the outlines of one picture fade into those of another with no abrupt shock of change. 1 had been in one picture, and it grew into another—that ’was all.

“The place I came into was a cabin in a ship; I knew that by the portholes and the way the floor regularly rose and fell. He, the man who had called me, was lying in a berth. He seemed to be asleep. His face was turned toward the wall, and one arm was thrown up over his cheek and forehead. A second man stood in the room —an Italian, I thought, from his black, •waxed moustache. A square, leather handbag, full of little glass vials, lay open on the table, and beside it stood a decanter of brandy and a goblet. I knew somehow that he had taken the brandy from a cabinet on the wall, for its door'was swinging open, and by the way he wavered on his feet and by the vacant look in his beady black eyes I knew that he was drunk.

“When I found myself in the room, he had one of the little vials in his hand and was about to pour some of the liquid it held into a glass of water. I knew perfectly well that it was poison, and that it was intended for the man in the berth—the man .1 loved. I ecreamed; but he paid no attention to me. Then I came close and took hold of his wrist; but he went on pouring just as if I had not been there at nil. He was so strong! It made a dull, cloudy mixture in the glass; There came a noise outside the door, and iie turned quickly, stuffed the decanter into the cabinet, set the glass on the stand by the berth, mid went out, stumbling.

“I tried to pick up the glass, but it seemed to weigh a ton. While 1 was struggling with it, another man came in. He didn't appear to see me, either, and made no answer when 1 spoke te. him. He came in, swearing under his breath as if he had been quarrelling; but looked at the man in the berth ait he was very fond of him. He glanced at his watch, took a spoon from the drawer, and filled it out of the glass, I knew the dose was for the ‘ steeping man. and that if he swallowed it he would die.

“It seemed to me that I lived an hour in those few seconds-. • I stood before him and snatched at the spoon,-and held the other's hands, and prayed to God. But I might have been a stone. He.paid no more heed than the Italian had done. It is poison! I cried. ‘Poison, poison! You don’t know what you are doing!’ I threw both arms around him frantically and tried to drag him away. “Suddenly he started, and T saw his face twitch. ‘Blank that Nicol ini and his unholy perfumes!’ he said. He faced round shraply, struck his elbow against the table, and dropped both glass and spoon .to the floor. I heard the glass break. I had turned very tl'zz.y—l thought to myself that I was fainting, and then—l woke up, with my head on the little wicker table in the magnolia-walk, with the air full of the heavy dew-smell of the blossoms and the dinner-dressing bell strikin'-. i jP lat ’ s “H. But I can feel it still, to the very finger-tips: the awful numbing fear, and the ..gladness when it passed.”

The man had listened absorlmdlv. ‘Ht must have been terrifically vivid,” he i ftl ~°,Y 3 ou had actually seen it.” i

“Not a line of it has faded. It is as fresh to-day as it was the moment 1 awoke.”

They sat silent a moment, the man pondering. “And the next time’”. he said at length.

“The next time,” she went on, “as. I said, was the night of February 12th. Yifur letHy, mailed at Alexandria, bad' come, and 1 spent the evening in my room reading it. It was late when I went to bed. and as I lay trying to go to sleep, 1 was thinking of one thing you said: that your yacht-host. Mr. Burlingame, and 1 wouldn't get along well together, because 1 loved the magnolia scent so, while it happened to be his pet detestation.”

“ 1 remember,” he said. “He had a curious hatred for that particular odour. While we were at Assuan, on the Nile, he discharged bis best native servant, because he thought he had hail some of the flowers (or a particularly rank Egyptian species that had mpch . the same perfume) in the room where he gave a dinner to a local pasha. Pardon me, 1 didn't mean to interrupt.”

“ I was still smiling at that sentence in your letter,” she went on again, “ when I remembered that a great China, bowl of magnolias sat in the hall just outside the door. I brought them in and set them on my lamp-stand elose to the pillow, with your letter beneath them, and so it was that I fell asleep.

“ This time it seemed, when the calling came, as though I had been waiting and listening for it for many minutes, and it was fainter and farther away than the first time. The pictures slipped and merged again, just as before. and suddenly I was there. It was a different scene in this dream—a wide space like a roofed courtyard, with a raised platform at one end, surrounded with curiously twisted stone columns.* A sudden exclamation came from the man beside her. “ What did you say?” she asked.

“ Nothing.” he interposed hurriedly “ that is—will you go on, please?” His fingers had clenched themselves between his knees, and the face he turned from her was tense with a strange and growing wonder.

“ There was a floor of mosaic in red and blue. A table was set at one end, as if for a meal, and about it stood a group of men—three in the eveningdress of Englishmen or Americans—the man who had dropped the glass in the ship's cabin was one of them—and three or four in close-buttoned coats, shaped in at the waist, with yellow frogging and red fezz.es.

“ Yes. yes!” broke in the man eagerly; but without turning, as she drew a long sobbing breath. “And the other?” “He was standing with his back toward me, aitd half in shadow. I could see that he held a broken ehair upright in the air by its back, like a club, and below the edge of the raised platform a brown, naked body lay rolling in agony, thudding with its hands on the stone pavement. All this lasted only a second; but I can’t express how clearly I saw every detail of it all, even down to the arabesques carved on the walls, and the sickly loathy look of fear on the faces of some brown, white-coated servants, who were peering in between some curtains. It was just at sunset, for a great bar of deep, purplish-magenta came through a circular window above the table.

. "Then—then-—T saw why the calling had come. Another brown naked form was sprawled one side, behind a pillar. A crooked knife was between his teeth, and he was. crawling, like a great misshapen snake, straight, straight behind the man with the chair. As he lowered the chair, the brown form rose to its feet. The servants now were lifting the one who lay on the pavement, and everyone was looking in that direction. If I lived a thousand years, I should never forget what I felt and suffered in that moment! Dying oneself can’t be nearly so ” Her words had trailed away into ineohereney. “Dear!” said the man, and put out his hand and took her own. His eyes were moist and shining with sudden knowledge, and his own voice was uncertain. “I screamed—l eould hear myself, tniS nobody else eould hear me. Then, all at once, I knew that I must make some one else see: that if the man in the shadow turned, it would be too late —the crouching figure would strike first. How I strove to send out the current of my will to make him see the ereepipg murderer that he was blind to! Every vein was like a throbbing lire; but my heart was teei- It was his life! It was .worth more than all the world to. me. If ho died, I knew I wanted to die too. And I was powerless,'powerless—nothing but a wrbatling shndowx:luul ,the arm I clung to was as steady ns if I had had no bc-

ing! 1 desperate. I threw myself ou him, nikl beat at his face with both Lands. It was like striking a cloud —x>o fehock. or socmml, or resistance. •’Suddenly the aanie thing happened a-t on the ship. He started, angrily, 1 thought. 1 saw his nostrils expand. He turned ■ and »aw the deadly figure behind the pillar. •’lie moved so owiftly that something bright and shining seemed to leap from nowhere into his hand. There was a loud, crashing, smoking report that turned everything to storm, a fearful, shrieking confusion of voices and wind and Hight and fall. And then —1 was in niy own room here at Del Monte, in my bed, with the great bowl of magnolias beside me,’and the dawn coming in at the open window. 1 was in a fever for several days afterward.*’ tshe ended with a lung, shuddering eigh. “Now,” she said presently, “I’ve iold you. 1 presume I am to see Dr. Holbrook ?” v “Will you wait here,” he asked, “on this hank, for ten minutes? I want to go to mv room and bring something for you to see.” “Yes,” she agreed, and added with a pale -mile: “1 sltull expect you to return with no less than two attendants and a ctrait jacket. But 1 don’t promise to go quietly.” The moon had been dropping lower, and as his quick footfall died away its topmost rim slipped below' the fringe of the cypresses, leaving the lake a ghostly [tarn of darkness, and the near thicket a wraith-haunted playground of elemental things. She leaned back on the pungenl. springy moss, vibrating at once ito the beauty of the night and to the Thrill to which her strange recital had Recorded. Experience had opened her anind to the eternal enigma of life and living, the subtle mystery of soul-instinct. Iler maturing thinking trail always been clear and wholesome: all her life, each several night had meant a cooling bath in the perfect health of sleep, until this ivexing cross current, this mixed motive of joy and pain, had come to maze her. This concrete bodily presence was the man she loved; but even with his arms rlm»ut her had risen this spectre of ti tipiritir.il affinity that, in its sleeping consciousness. her soul recognised and fled ito. Could one love two men—one in a fleshly envehqi and one in the immaterial body of vision? a living suitor and a. dream lover? An uncanny sense of unreality swept over her, and even in this she >eemed to feel a warm human breath bgainst her hair. She crouched close to the. ground, striking it hard with resentful liumls. “What shall I do? What tdiall f do?” she cried to the swathing b*a*ow.<. She had grown calmer before she heard his returning steps. As he sat down beside her. she saw that he had brought with him a flat morocco-hound book, and a tiny electric pocket-lantern, while a letter, fresh from the post, was in his hand. “It’s from Burlingame.” he said, •‘posted at Alexandria, just in by the late mail. 1 read it for the first time not jive minutes -ago. as it was handed to me at the desk.” He laid the volume and letter on his knee, and focussed the gleaming bulb of the lantern upon them. '•You have told me a wonderful story, sweet heart, more wonderful than I have ever heard. I am going to add a chapiter to it. which I think will exorcise the Terror of your dream forever.” She looked up. puzzled, for his face was grave to reverence, yet softened and glowing a» if from some brilliance within. “Your first dream.” he went on. “came last November. What 1 am going to read you now is the closing page of Burlingame’s letter. Listen: “I enclose you a clipping from ‘Galignani’s.' to the effect that one Nicolini. a. discredited medico here, has l>een arrested for manslaughter. It sc ans that whe ii responsibly drunk he dosed a poor tourist with something deadly—cyanide of cacodyl. I lielirvc, instead of ipecac. Apropos this interesting Italian. I am going to confess here something you ltev< r knew. Do you remember last Novemlie'r when a certain comrade of mine Tva*» down *ick on tin’ yacht with a touch of Mediterranean fever? Well, the first <iay he got oil' his head. I sent for a doctor ami by some evil luck drew this same Ta-cal. He hadn’t made his l>ad name then, ami my ignorance was complete: so I told him to leave some medicine. You renumber my hatred for the magnolia Fcent ? Well, the idiot used some such perfume. He left the cabin positively

reeking with it; and wh. u 1 came in I was so ill-tempered as to upset the glass and spill all the medicine he had left. It the clipping and my tale of this accident .’ combined, do not convince you that some patients bear charmed lives, the word of the consulate surgeon whom I got an hour later, may do so. He took oath tliat the glass had held enough laudanum to kill the entire crew, including your friend and ex-commander. “Burlingame.” She had not spoken, and the shade held her face; but her hands were clasping liis arm with an almost hysterical pressure. He had read slowly and distinctly, while the beam from the lens wavered on the crackling white paper like a huge glow-worm. He laid down the letter now and turned to the thin morocco volume. “Your second dream,” he said, “was on the night of the twelfth of February. This book is my diary. At that date—he turned the leaves rapidly—the yacht lay at Assuan, in Upper Egypt.” He broke off a moment to pencil some figures on the margin. “At dawn here, on the day of your dream, it was then, let us say, sunset, eight o’clock in the evening. at Assuan. You se? what,l am coming to?” . . “Yes, yes!” she cried, with her breath coming faster, her pulses beating to riot. ‘ Go on!” He turned to a folded leaf and read: “Assuan, February 11. — A dull day. Burlingame and I had an unpleasant row this morning with a couple of the servants of Aman Pasha, over the beating of a slave-boy. He thrashed one, and I was obliged to ditto the other. It seems the beating was by the pasha’s order. 4 * “Later. —Burly is going to make it all right with the old hypocrite by giving him an American dinner at the local ‘Sherry’s’—dress-suits, champagne, and carte blanche to Sidi as to courses.” “Assuan, February 12.—A dull day. Burlingame’s dinner to Aman Pasha in the evening ended with fireworks.” She looked up startled, into his smiling face. “That is all the entry,” he said. “This diary, you see, is for my' mother’s eyes. What really happened that night in Assuan. Burlinghame, the British Consul, and I agreed to be silent about. But I know now, sweetheart, what 1 should never have guessed but for your story—a knowledge that makes me very humble. I know' now,” and his voice shook, “that your love has twice sent y our spirit to me in a moment of deadly peril, once to snatch my' life from a hate that failed only by’ a fraction of a second. Dearest, don’t you understand? I am the comrade Burlingame speaks of in his letter—the sick man you loved, who lay’ in his berth that third of November. I am the man you loved, who stood in the sunset shadow that evening with the chair. It was Burlingame who spilled the laudanum at Alexandria, Burlingame whose revolver stopped the man behind ihe pillar at Assuan; but it was you—thank God, you. Jessica! — who both times came to warn him and to save me!” He had opened his arms, and she crept into them in a great wonder. “It was you only that 1 loved all the while.’’ she whispered, “and I never knew! But it was the flowers after all. They spoke where I could not. I am glad I always loved them so.” “That reminds me.” he said; “there is a postscript to the letter, that I didn’t lead.” And with one arm about her, he lead the closing words: “P.S. —I have taken back Sidi into my service. He has the assurance to stick to his yarn about having had no magnolias on the premises the night of my Aman Pasha dinner, when those brutes of fellahs came so near knifing us. It was a curious thing about those magnolias, wasn’t it ?” i The tiny eLctric bulb went out, and the dim. purpurea! night, with its soft, insistent odours, wrapped them around. Her head was on his breast, and her lips repeated softly—so low that he bent where she lay’ in his arms to hear:—• ‘‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it!”