CHAPTER XX
BRIDE’S VIGIL
BRIDE was awakened from sleep by the sound of a voice.
“Bride! Bride! Oh, my love, farewell! God grant we meet again in the eternal haven of rest! Farewell, my love, farewell!”
The voice sounded so loud in her ears that the girl started wide awake in bed, and found herself sitting up, gazing across the dimly-lighted room, in the expectation of seeing some one beside her.
But there was nothing. The room was empty, save for her own presence. The fire was not yet out, and the night-lamp on the table in the corner burned with a steady ray. Outside, the voice of the storm wailed round the corners of the house; but Bride was too well used to the voice of wind and water to think she had been deceived by that. There was nothing in the voice of the gale to-night different from what she was used to hear wherever the winter days had come. Often and often the tempest raged with double and treble power about the exposed castle, and yet she was not disturbed. What, then, had happened to-night?
She passed her hands across her eyes, as if to clear away the mists of sleep.
“It was Eustace’s voice!” she said in her heart, and a light shiver ran through her.
Perhaps she had been thinking of Eustace at sea before she slept, for her dreams had been of a ship ploughing through the waves. She could not recall all that she had dreamed; but she was vaguely conscious that her visions had been uneasy ones of terror and peril. She could not be sure whether she had dreamed of Eustace: everything was confused in her mind. But that voice calling her name through the darkness had been utterly different from anything that had gone before, and had effectually aroused her from sleep.
“Is he in peril? Is he thinking of me?” she asked herself; and even as she put the question she rose from her bed and began mechanically to dress herself; for there was only one thing now possible for Bride, and that was to pour out her soul in prayer for the man she loved—the man she believed to be in danger at this very moment. Why that conviction of his peril came so strongly upon her she could hardly have explained. She had had no vivid dream; she had gone to rest with no presentiment of evil. That dream-cry was the only cause of her uneasiness; but the conviction was so strong that there could be no more sleep for her that night. She was absolutely certain of that, and she quickly dressed herself, as though to be ready for a call when it came; and when she had stirred the fire into a glow, and had trimmed and lighted her larger lamp, she knelt down beside the little table whereon lay her books of devotion, and the Bible which had been her mother’s, and laid bare her soul in supplication and prayer for the man she now knew that she loved, and whom she fully believed to be in peril to-night, though whether this peril were physical or spiritual she could not tell.