She said this so calmly that March felt severely disappointed. In the height of his enthusiasm he forgot that the poor girl had as yet seen nothing to draw out her feelings towards him as his had been drawn out towards her. She had seen no “vision,” except, indeed, the vision of a wretched, dishevelled youth, of an abrupt, excitable temperament, with one side of his countenance scratched in a most disreputable manner, and the other side swelled and mottled to such an extent that it resembled a cheap plum-pudding with the fruit unequally and sparsely distributed over its yellow surface.
March was mollified, however, when the girl suggested that his pillow seemed uncomfortable, and rose to adjust it with tender care. Then she said: “Now me bring blankit. You go sleep. Me sit here till you sleep, after that me go away. If ye wants me, holler out. Me sleep in next room.”
So saying, this wonderful creature flitted across the cavern and vanished, thereby revealing to March the fact that there was a third cavern in that place. Presently she returned with a green blanket, and spread it over him, after which she sat down by the fire and seemed absorbed in her private meditations while March tried to sleep.
But what a night March had of it! Whichever way he turned, that vision was ever before his eyes. When he awoke with a start, there she was, bending over the fire. When he dreamed, there she was, floating in an atmosphere of blue stars. Sometimes she was smiling on him, sometimes gazing sadly, but never otherwise than sweetly. Presently he saw her sitting on Dick’s knee, twisting his great moustache with her delicate hand, and he was about to ask Dick how he had managed to get back so soon, when he (the Wild Man) suddenly changed into March’s own mother, who clasped the vision fervently to her breast and called her her own darling son! There was no end to it. She never left him. Sometimes she appeared in curious forms and in odd aspects—though always pleasant and sweet to look upon. Sometimes she was dancing gracefully like an embodied zephyr on the floor; frequently walking in mid-air; occasionally perambulating the ceiling of the cave. She often changed her place, but she never went away. There was no escape. And March was glad of it. He didn’t want to escape. He was only too happy to court the phantom. But it did not require courting. It hovered over him, walked round him, sat beside him, beckoned to him, and smiled at him. Never,—no, never since the world began was any scratched and battered youth so thoroughly badgered and bewitched, as was poor March Marston on that memorable night, by that naughty vision in leather!
Chapter Eighteen.
The Cave of the Wild Man of the West—March and Mary hold pleasant Intercourse—Dick’s good Qualities enlarged on—The Wild Man gives a Redskin a strange Lesson—A startling Interruption to pleasant Converse.
When March Marston awoke the following morning, and found himself lying on a low couch in the mysterious cavern of the Wild Man of the West, he experienced the curious sensation, with which every one is more or less familiar, of not knowing where he was.
The vision in leather, which had worried him to such an extent during the night, had left him in peace—as most visions usually do—an hour or so before daybreak, and as the real vision had not yet issued from the inner chamber of the cave, there was nothing familiar near him when he awoke to recall his scattered senses. His first effort to rise, however, quickened his memory amazingly. Pains shot through all his limbs: the chase, the fall, Dick, the cavern, recurred to him; and last—but not least, for it obliterated and swallowed up all the rest—the vision broke upon his beclouded brain and cleared his faculties.