"Has the doctor come back yet, Mrs. Arnold?"
"He is in the hall at this moment, sir," she answered, with preciseness of manner, and a peculiar sweetness of voice.
Again the door opened, and again I heard the cat-like step, and felt the velvet touch that sent a shiver through me; and then succeeded a throbbing pain in my temples, dull aching in every limb, a high fever coursing through every vein, and I lived over again in delirium the scenes from which I had just escaped. Again I was lying beneath the roaring forest trees; again the sharp throes of mortal terror wrung from me the cry that I had uttered then, this time to be soothed by a tender and familiar voice; then restless with pain, and burning with fever, only pacified from that dream to be hurried off into another, wilder and more terrible. With glaring eyes and demoniac faces, the crowd of men, with Michael at their head, were in mad pursuit of a flying horse and rider; with hideous jeers and yells they urge them on, and closing round the frantic steed, they tear me, clinging round her, from Madge's neck, and holding me down upon the ground, wrench from my arm the bracelet, that resists, at first, their strongest efforts, till the warm blood flows, and the torn flesh quivers, as staggering back, a ruffian lifts the bloody prize, and with a wild cry I wake, only to drop into another broken slumber, and to dream another hideous dream.
This time it is Mrs. Roberts, who, with rigid, cruel face, holds me down, and binding my powerless hands, thrusts me, struggling and frantic, into the dread, mysterious darkness of that room. And choking with terror, the agony is dispelled by the low voice that says, "What is it now, poor child?" and panting with fright, I cling to the hand that soothes me, and only from its steady grasp gain anything like peace. And so the night wears on. How much of these wild dreams revealed themselves in speech I know not, and how much of the history of that night belongs to fact, and how much to fancy, it is beyond me to decide.
[CHAPTER XI.]
"Oh! what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"
SCOTT.
Emerging from this sea of dreams tumultuous, I seemed, on a certain cold, grey morning, to be stranded on the shores of reality by an ebbing tide of water gruel and weak tea. Having, from my extreme youth, entertained undisguised aversion to these articles of food, I had steadily refused to let a spoonful pass my lips; consequently, my nurse and doctor not having relinquished a hope that in time I would come to terms, many separate editions of these invigorating compounds stood upon the table by my bed, in bowls of larger growth, in teacups and saucers, and every variety of earthen and china vessels, all covered and arranged with consummate care and skill.
These observations I made with great interest, as after a long period of dreamy stupor, the "keen demands of appetite," or some indignant protest of nature against such indolent inactivity, roused me; and raising myself upon my elbow, I looked around with much curiosity and some bewilderment. The room was entirely unfamiliar, long and old-fashioned looking. The bed and the one window were curtained with white dimity; the walls and ceiling were white-washed to a painful whiteness; the counterpane, the pillows, the sheets, were one drift of snow. Indeed, so forcible was this impression, that for a moment it was a question with me whether I had not just waked up from a nap in one of those snow-houses, so called, which it had been the delight of my childhood to construct, being excavations in some adjacent snow-bank, achieved with the help of a friendly spade, in which I would lie and dream of icy palaces, and frosty fairy fabrics. The idea that I had been napping it in one of these juvenile architectural devices, was favored by the lowness of the white ceiling, which seemed almost within touch, and the long, narrow shape of the room, terminating in a small, white-curtained window, through which I caught a glimpse of cold grey sky, that suggested snow and chill.
A tiny fire, however, in a tiny grate, and a woman sewing by what I had conceived to be the mouth of the cave, but which, I was obliged to confess, was unmistakably a window, quite dispelled the illusion, and I had nothing left me but to come down to cold reality again, after a sojourn in dream-land so long as to render me a little uncertain and bewildered on all mundane matters. I looked quite attentively for some time at the woman by the window, then startled her very considerably by saying suddenly: