The door had just been opened, and the rooms had that dreary, uncomfortable look large, lonely rooms always wear in the gray dawn of the morning, a yawning waiter, half-asleep, passed him, staring with lack-luster eyes, as though he had seen a ghost, and a slip-shod, frizzle-headed chambermaid uttered a faint scream as her eyes fell on his haggard face and wet garments.
"Let me have a private room immediately," was his command to the waiter.
"Yes, sir; this way, sir," said the man, recovering from his surprise at the entrance of so strange-looking an individual.
He ushered him into a neat, comfortably furnished room, and Courtney threw himself into a chair, and said:
"Light a fire here, and bring me up a cigar and a cup of strong coffee."
"A fire, sir," said the waiter, surprised at such a demand in summer.
"Yes, sir, a fire; did I not speak plainly enough," said Courtney, in a tone that sent the man hastily from the room.
With his garments soaked through, he began to feel cold and chilled; though in the fever of his mind, up to the present, he had not observed it. A fire was soon kindled, and spreading his cloak and outer clothes before it to dry, he threw himself on his bed to try and lose the maddening recollection of the past night in sleep.
Totally exhausted by fatigue and excitement, he succeeded at last, but only to re-act over again in his dreams the catastrophe of the preceding hours. Again he saw the lifeless form of his murdered wife lying rigid at his feet; then would flit before his horror-stricken gaze the ghostly apparition of the isle, with its wild, terrific shriek of "murderer!" then the gallows, the coffin, the hangman, with all the fearful paraphernalia of the felon's death, would rise in ghastly array before his distorted imagination; he could feel the very rope encircling his neck, and by some strange contradiction, his wife, bright, beautiful, and happy as he had first known her, stood smilingly adjusting it, and stranger still, he felt no surprise at seeing her there; he heard the fatal signal given, the drop sliding from beneath his feet, and with a shriek of terror he sprang up out of bed, the cold perspiration starting from every pore.
"Great Heaven! am I never to lose the recollection of that fearful night, and my more awful crime? Oh, for the fabled waters of Lethe to drown recollection! Must I forever go through the world with this mark of Cain?—this red-hot brand of murder on my face, as well as on my soul? Saints in heaven! should this dream prove true?"