"My estates need a steward," said I, "and I--God knows I need a friend." And with little more talk the bargain was struck.
During all this time, however, I had not so much as breathed a word to him concerning the doings of that night in Castle Lukstein. At first the matter was too hot in my thoughts, and even afterwards, when the horror of my memories had dimmed, I could not bring myself to the point of speech. Had it not been for the appearance and intervention of the Countess, doubtless I should have blurted out the tale long before. But with her face ever fixed within my view, I could not speak; I could only picture it desolate with grief, and washed with a pitiful rain of tears. Moreover, I knew that Jack would account my story as the story of a worthy exploit, and I shrank from his praise as from a burning iron.
'Twould have, nevertheless, been strange had not my ravings in my delirium disclosed some portion of the night's incidents, and that they did so I understood from a certain speech Jack once made me. 'Twas when I was yet lying sick at Verona. One morning, when I was come to my senses after a feverish night, he walked over to my bedside from the chair where he had been watching.
"I have been a common fool," says he, and repeats the remark, shifting a foot to and fro on the floor; and then he claps his hand upon mine.
"God send me such a friend as you, Morrice, if ever trouble comes to me!" says he, and so gets him quickly from the room.
Often did I wonder how much I had betrayed, but I had reason subsequently to believe that 'twas very little; just enough to assure him that I had not flinched from the conflict, with probably some revelation of the fear in which I engaged upon it.
'Twas in the last days of March that I saw once more the rolling slopes of Yewbarrow, streaked here and there with a ribbon of snow, and my house at the base of it, its grey tiles shining in the sunset like glass; and a homely restfulness settled upon my spirit, and looking back upon the last months of purposeless wandering, I resolved to pass my days henceforward in a placid ordering of my estate.
This feeling of peace, however, stayed with me no great while, the very monotony of a quiet life casting me back upon my troubled recollections. As a relief, I sought diversion with Jack's ready assistance in the pleasures of the field. Hawking, hunting, and climbing--for which somehow my companion never acquired a taste--filled out the hours of daylight We chased the fox on foot along ridges of the hills; we hunted the red deer in the forests about Styhead; we walked miles across fell and valley to watch a wrestling-match or attend a fair. In a word, we lived a clean, open-air life of wholesome activity.
But alas! 'Twas of little profit to me. I would get me tired to bed only to plunge into a whirlpool of unrestful dreams, and toss there until the morning. Sometimes it would be the door of the little staircase to the Count's bedroom. I would see it opening and opening perpetually, and yet never wide open; or again, it would grow gigantic in size, and swing back across the world as though it was hinged betwixt the poles. Most often, however, it would be Count Lukstein's wife. I beheld her now, tall and stately, with her glorious aureole of hair and her dark, unseeing eyes eating through me like a slow fire as she advanced across the room; now I followed her as she moved through the moonlit garden with the taper burning clear and steady in her hand. But, however the dream began, 'twould always end the same way. The fiery windows of Castle Lukstein would leap upon me out of the darkness, and I would wake in a cold sweat, my body a-quiver, and her lone cry knelling in my ears.
A strange feature of these nightmare fancies, and a feature that greatly perplexed me, was that the Count himself played no part in them. Were my dreams the test and touchstone of the truth, I could never so much as have set eyes upon him. The encounter, the conversation which preceded it, the last cowardly thrust, and the dead form huddled up in my arms among the curtains--of these things I had not even a hint. They became erased from my memory the moment that I fell asleep. Then 'twas always the woman who was pictured to me; in no single instance the man. I wondered at this omission the more, inasmuch as I frequently thought of Count Lukstein during the day-time, remembering with an odd sense of envy the softness of his voice when he spoke concerning his wife.