A strange, eerie sensation crept over her listener. What sort of power was this—of separating soul from body during the mere ordinary unconsciousness produced by slumber?
“And that dream of yours, if it was a dream, was literally the saving of my life, Mona. Listen, now.” And then he told exactly how he had lain asleep in the deserted house, and how, thrilled by the startling accents of her anguished voice in the midnight silence, the vision of her troubled countenance, he had awakened barely in time to escape certain death. The hour coincided exactly.
“How was I dressed?” whispered Mona, a strong awe subduing her voice, as she gazed at him with startled eyes, and trembling somewhat.
“The vision was more or less indefinite, all but the face. Yet you were in white, with flowing hair, as on that night when you braved everything to try and make me forget my bruised and battered condition in sleep.”
“It is—is rather awful,” she whispered, with a shudder. “But in every detail the—the picture corresponds—time, place, appearance, everything. Oh, darling, surely your life is mine, that it has been given me to save twice.”
He was thinking the same thing. And then, running like a strand through the entrancement of this first meeting, came the thought of what such a consideration meant. Nothing lasts; love vulgarised by a commonplace legal tie least of all. This was one thing; but love united, with its hundred and one petty, uphill struggles and hardships, its familiarity breeding contempt, its daily friction of temper and will—that was another. He was not young enough to see only the enchantment of the moment, all deliriously sweet as this was. The other side of the picture would obtrude itself—disillusion, life soured. Nothing lasts; nothing which is real, that is. Such moments as this, such transitory blissful moments of a fool’s paradise, came as near to happiness as anything this life could afford; yet even they were dashed by the consciousness, the certainty, that they were nothing more. They constituted life no more than the five large beads constitute the whole rosary; happy indeed were it, if the proportionate parallel held good, and that one great joy were allowed for every decade of sorrow, and disillusionment, and deadness and pain.
Greatly concerned was the household on learning the approaching transfer of Mr Van Stolz, of whom Suffield declared that the Lord might have been pleased to create a more thoroughly good sort, but that He hadn’t.
“So he’s going to Barabastadt, you say, Mr Musgrave?” said Grace. “We may see him again, then. There are some relations of ours living up there, the Rendleshams. We go and stay with them sometimes.”
“Up there! Why, they’re about sixty miles from the town,” said Suffield. “They’ve got a place called Kameelsfontein, and the springbok shooting is heavenly.”