I started up, shivering with cold, and forgetting all about the dream, went up to my bedroom and was soon asleep.
However, when I awoke the dream came back to me, and so persistently that I determined to find out something about the photos, which had now a keener interest for me than before.
I questioned my landlady. She was unable to give me any information save what I had already guessed, that they had been bought at an auction at one of the Dublin salerooms, but she had no idea who the owner was, or who were the people in the group. She remembered that a former lodger had remarked that the old church was some church near Dublin, but she could not say which.
Here was something of a clue, and I determined to pursue it. I took the photo from the frame, and the next time I went to Dublin showed it to a monument maker in Brunswick Street. He at once told me the church was St. M——s, a few miles outside the city. I asked if it were he who had put up the Celtic cross. He said he had not, but adding it was the work of another sculptor who lived near Glasnevin.
I went to the sculptor whom he named, and showed him the photo. At once he recognised the cross at a glance. It had been erected to the memory of Mrs. A—— D——, who had died a few years after her marriage. Her death was, he said, the result of a misadventure, she having accidently taken the wrong medicine.
“Did she take it herself?” I asked.
“Yes, that was the evidence at the inquest. The husband was dreadfully cut up about it. It was he who put up the cross, one of the finest that ever left a Dublin yard,” said my informant, with an air of professional triumph.
“But for all that,” he continued, “he got married within a few months after his wife’s death, and then,” he added reflectively, “it is often the way, the greater the grief in the beginning the sooner it is got over.”
A question not to be decided this side of the grave if the whole of my dream might not have been true so much having proved itself so.