And again she glanced out. For the first time it struck her that this window overlooked the lower terrace walk which Celia preferred to avoid. With a sudden increase of interest, Hertha pushed up the sash, and leaned out. Yes, that was the very place, the walk bare and open at the end near the house, growing dim and shady as it was lost to view in the shrubberies farther on.
“If it were worth the trouble,” thought Hertha, “I should like to put on a cloak and go right along to the end and back. I don’t think I should be afraid; the moonlight is so bright, and everything is so still. No flopping branches or sighing wind to make one fanciful. Yes, I think I should venture. And how proud I should be to tell them of it in the morning.”
But even as she gazed, a slight misgiving seized her. Was the night so perfectly still, or was the wind suddenly getting up? Something was moving at the far end of the walk—the “White Weeper’s” walk. What? The branch of a tree probably; there were aspens down there, Hertha remembered, and a mere nothing would set them quivering.
A slight shiver ran through her—it was growing chilly. With a half-contemptuous smile at herself, she drew down the window, and in a very few moments was safely ensconced in bed, though somewhat shivery still.
“I hope I haven’t caught cold through my own folly,” was her last waking thought.
For, notwithstanding her preoccupied mind and a certain amount of excitement, of which she was conscious, Hertha fell asleep quickly, and any one seeing her would have said that her slumbers were sound and untroubled.
But, in point of fact, she was dreaming vividly—all the events of the last few days seemed to be re-enacted before her, with the addition of various fantastic accompaniments such as dreamers know well. Friends and acquaintances she had not thought of for years suddenly appeared as familiar guests among the members of the family at White Turrets. Her own grandmother, whom as a child Hertha had been very fond of, seemed to be there as an ancient châtelaine of the place, pointing out to her, among the visitors, historical personages whom no living being could have known outside a book.
“We are expecting the King—Louis XVI—of course, and Queen Marie Antoinette, this evening. They have long wished to visit White Turrets, and now,” her grandmother was explaining to her, when, with a sudden start, Hertha awoke.
She was not sorry, for though the dream had been of curiously fascinating and fantastic interest, she had been conscious—and the consciousness remained with her even after she was awake—of a strange indescribable fear, that dream fear which, I fancy, at some time or other, every one must have experienced: a fear as of fate, all-pervading and irresistible, of perfectly unspeakable strangeness, as if we had got on to another plane of existence altogether, where nothing was as we had ever known it, where we feel ourselves alone in an isolation such as real life has never, even faintly, figured to us. Through all the familiar scenery of her dream—through the sound of her grandmother’s voice, and the perfect knowledge that she was here, at White Turrets, among the friends she seemed now to know so well—through the laughter and the smiles she knew to be around her, was this terrible ghastly consciousness of fear. And it did not at once disappear when she awoke. It seemed still to be clinging to her, haunting the air round about her. Never had Hertha suffered in the same way to such an extent.
“What can be the matter with me?” she said to herself. “I feel poisoned with fear. Dear me, if this sort of thing is the kind of sensation one has in a haunted room, Heaven preserve me from such an experience! But can there be any thing uncanny in this room? I have never felt it before. Oh no, it must all be fancy and nonsense. My nerves are upset, I suppose. I have been taking my friends’ troubles too much to heart.”