“Well, what was he like?—be quick, for heaven’s sake.”
“The first moment that I caught sight of him,” continue I, speaking quickly, “I felt certain that he was Irish; to no other nationality could such a type of face have belonged. His wild rough hair fell down over his forehead, reaching his shagged and overhanging brows. He had the wide grinning slit of a mouth—the long nose, the cunningly twinkling eyes—that one so often sees, in combination with a shambling gait and ragged tail-coat, at the railway stations or in the harvest fields at this time of year.” A pause. “I do not know how it came to me,” I go on presently; “but I felt as convinced as if I had been told—as if I had known it for a positive fact—that he was one of your own labourers—one of your own harvest men. Have you any Irishmen working for you?”
“Of course we have,” answers Jane, rather sharply, “but that proves nothing. Do not they, as you observed just now, come over in droves at this time of the year for the harvest?”
“I am sorry,” say I, sighing. “I wish you had not. Well, let me finish; I have just done—I had been holding the door-handle mechanically in my hand; I suppose I pulled it unconsciously towards me, for the door hinge creaked a little, but quite audibly. To my unspeakable horror the man turned round and saw me. Good God! he would cut my throat too with that red, red reaping hook! I tried to get into the passage and lock the door, but the key was on the inside. I tried to scream, I tried to run; but voice and legs disobeyed me. The bed and room and man began to dance before me; a black earthquake seemed to swallow me up, and I suppose I fell down in a swoon. When I awoke really the blessed morning had come, and a robin was singing outside my window on an apple bough. There—you have it all, and now let me look for a ‘Bradshaw,’ for I am so frightened and unhinged that go I must.”
CHAPTER III.
“I must own that it has taken away appetite,” I say, with rather a sickly smile, as we sit round the breakfast table. “I assure you that I mean no insult to your fresh eggs and bread-and-butter, but I simply cannot eat.”
“It certainly was an exceptionally dreadful dream,” says Jane, whose colour has returned, and who is a good deal fortified and reassured by the influences of breakfast and of her husband’s scepticism; for a condensed and shortened version of my dream has been told to him, and he has easily laughed it to scorn. “Exceptionally dreadful, chiefly from its extreme consistency and precision of detail. But still, you know, dear, one has had hideous dreams oneself times out of mind and they never came to anything. I remember once I dreamt that all my teeth came out in my mouth at once—double ones and all; but that was ten years ago, and they still keep their situations, nor did I about that time lose any friend, which they say such a dream is a sign of.”
“You say that some unaccountable instinct told you that the hero of your dream was one of my own men,” says Robin, turning towards me with a covert smile of benevolent contempt for my superstitiousness; “did not I understand you to say so?”
“Yes,” reply I, not in the least shaken by his hardly-veiled disbelief. “I do not know how it came to me, but I was as much persuaded of that, and am so still, as I am of my own identity.”
“I will tell you of a plan then to prove the truth of your vision,” returns he, smiling. “I will take you through the fields this morning and you shall see all my men at work, both the ordinary staff and the harvest casuals, Irish and all. If amongst them you find the counterpart of Jane’s and my murderer” (a smile) “I will promise then—no, not even then can I promise to believe you, for there is such a family likeness between all Irishmen, at all events, between all the Irishmen that one sees out of Ireland.”