CHAPTER II.
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.”