Johnny Ludlow, Fourth Series

by Mrs. Henry Wood

“It must be investigated,” said Alice to them. “Will you undertake it?”

“My dear young lady, one cannot act upon a fancy—a dream,” cried old Paul: and there was a curious sound of compassionate pity in his voice, which betrayed to Alice the gratifying fact that he was regarding her as a monomaniac.

“If you will not act, others will,” she concluded at last, after exhausting her arguments in vain. And she came away with me in resentment, having totally forgotten all about her mother’s business.

To Crabb Cot then—she would go—to take counsel with the Squire. He told her to her face she was worse than a lunatic to suspect Sir Dace; and he would hardly get out the sealed packet at all. It was opened at last, and the dream, as written down in it by herself at the time, read.

“John Tanerton, my husband, was going to sea in command,” it began. “He came to me the morning of the day they were to sail, looking very patient, pale and sorrowful: more so than any one, I think, could look in life. He and I seemed to have had some estrangement the previous night that was not remembered by either of us now, and I, for one, repented of it. Somebody was murdered (though I could not tell how this had been revealed to me), some man; Jack was suspected by all people, but they could not bring it home to him. We were in some strange town; strangers in it; though I, as it seemed to me, had been in it once, many years before. All this while, Jack was standing before me in his sadness and sorrow, mutely appealing to me, as it seemed, to clear him. Everybody was talking of it and glancing at us askance, everybody shunned us, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town before, the man now murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman of note in the town; and a conviction came over me, powerful as a revelation, that it was he who had now committed the murder. I left Jack, and told this to some one connected with the ship, its owner, I think. He laughed at the words, saying that the gentleman I would accuse was of high authority in the town, one of its first magnates. That he had done it, however high he might be, I felt perfectly certain; but nobody would listen to me; nobody would heed so improbable a tale: and, in the trouble this brought me, I awoke. Such trouble! Nothing like it could be felt in real life.

“That was dream the first.

“I lay awake for some little time thinking of it, and then went to sleep again: and this was dream the second.

“The dream seemed to recommence from where it had left off. It was afternoon. I was in a large open carriage, going through the streets of the town, the ship’s owner (as I say I think he was) sitting beside me. In passing over a bridge we saw two gentlemen walking towards us arm-in-arm on the footpath, one of them an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked hat, the other a tall, evil-looking dark man, who wore a long brown coat and kept his eyes on the ground. Though I had never seen him in my life before, I knew it was the guilty man; he had killed the other, committed the crime in secret: but ere I could speak, he who was sitting with me said, ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused this morning. He stands before everybody else in the town. Fancy your accusing him of such a thing!’ It seemed to me that I did not answer, could not answer for the pain. That he was guilty I knew, and not Jack, but I had no means of bringing it home to him. He and the man in uniform walked on in their secure immunity, and I went on in the carriage in my pain. The pain awoke me.

“And now it only remains for me to declare that I have set down this singular dream truthfully, word for word; and I shall seal it up and keep it. It may be of use if any trouble falls upon Jack, as the dream seems to foretell—and of some trouble in store for him he has already felt the shadow. So strangely vivid a dream, and the intense pain it brought and leaves with me, can hardly have visited me for nothing.—Alice Tanerton.”