Then, without another word, he left the room and marched slowly upstairs to bed. Van Duren had spoken no more than the truth when he said that he was terribly tired. He had been travelling continuously for eighteen hours, and was thoroughly worn out. The news told him by Pringle had taken away whatever appetite he might otherwise have had, while leaving the need of some refreshment strongly upon him.
He was never without cognac in his bedroom. Of this he now took a powerful dose, and then flinging himself upon the bed, dressed as he was, in three minutes he was fast asleep.
While sleeping thus, he had a dream--a dream more strangely vivid, more realistic in all its details, than any that he had ever had before.
In this dream he himself was as it were an impersonal being, the spectator of a drama in which he was called upon to play no part. The scene of the drama in question was the bottom of the sea. Through the green and limpid twilight, the floor, covered with sand and shells, and huge, smooth-washed boulders, could be seen stretching away on every side till lost in the dim distance. Fishes of various kinds, some such as are never seen by mortal eye, swam silently to and fro in the liquid depths. The middle distance of the sea was filled up with a huge mass of wreckage and broken timber. There was no need to tell the dreamer of what good ship the wreck was now before him. Even in his sleep, his lips murmured, "That is the Albatross." In and out of the broken bulks, and rotting portholes, and shattered hatchways, strange monsters of the sea, big and little, kept crawling continually.
But presently there was a quick, frightened movement among the fishes, and the dreamer beheld descending slowly from unknown heights a ladder made of stout rope and weighted heavily at the bottom. In a little while the weights touched the ground, and the ladder became stationary and firm. Soon there could be seen, coming down slowly and heedfully, a man in the full costume of a diver, and looking in it no unfit companion for the strange creatures whose haunts he had for a little while invaded. In a few minutes he was joined by another man similarly attired. Together the two men bent their steps towards the wreck. There was no need to tell the dreamer what they were there to look for. Would they find it, or would they not? But in his impersonality he had no further interest in having this question answered than a spectator at a play might have; indeed, so slightly was he interested, that he laughed aloud more than once as he watched the strange, awkward movements of the two men as they clambered around and about the wreck.
Round and about, in and out, they moved without any apparent success. Evidently, the object they had come in search of was not to be found. At length, as if by mutual consent, they walked back to the ladder. One of them had got his foot on the lowermost rung, when his mate touched him on the shoulder and pointed back to the wreck. The sleeper's eyes followed the direction of the man's finger, and saw there--what? The spectral figure of a man standing on the broken bulwarks of the ship, and pointing downwards with outstretched finger to a heap of rotting timber and loose wreckage at its feet. The figure was diaphanous; the broken stump of a mast in front of which it was standing could be clearly seen through it. It seemed to have a wavering motion, very slight, but still perceptible, like that of a flame which quivers by the intensity of its own heat. Although its finger pointed downwards, the face of the figure was bent full on the face of the sleeping man--the same face that he had seen in the glass, haggard, deathlike, with a thin line of black moustache; while its black, inscrutable eyes gazed down through his eyes into his very soul. There was no laughter, no cynicism left in the dreamer now--nothing but an unspeakable horror that stirred his hair and chilled the beating of his heart even while he slept. He could not turn away his eyes from those other eyes that were staring into his; but for all that he could see, as we do see in dreams, everything that was going on around him. He could see the men moving slowly back towards the wreck, in obedience to the invitation of the spectre, of whom they seemed to have no dread. He could see them searching and turning over the heap of mouldering débris at which the finger was so persistently pointed, and presently he could see them drag from the midst of it a small square oaken box, the silver clamps of which were all tarnished and black with the action of the sea. How well he remembered that box! what cause he had to remember it!
Carrying the box carefully for fear lest it should fall to pieces, one of the men brought it presently to the foot of the ladder, close to which, let down from the heights above, hung a cord with a hook at the end of it. To this hook the box was now fastened by one of the men, then a tug was given to the cord, and next moment the box began slowly to ascend, drawn up by unseen hands above.
The finger of the spectre now pointed upward. Soon the box was lost to view, and as it disappeared, the twilight of the scene seemed to darken and deepen and the water to lose somewhat of its limpid clearness. It was as though night were reaching down with its hand of blackness to the bottom of the sea. Slowly but surely the whole scene grew blurred and indistinct as though one filmy veil of darkness after another were being drawn between it and the dreamer's eyes, till at length the familiar walls of the dreamer's bedroom began to grow out of the darkness, and Max Van Duren knew that he was awake, and that the dawn of another day was beginning to broaden in the east. From head to foot he was bathed in perspiration, and he was trembling in every limb. He sat up on the bed and gazed timidly around, as half expecting to see the eyes of the spectre staring at him from some dim corner of the room; but presently he heard a welcome footstep on the stairs outside, and then came the voice of Pringle, telling him that it was time to get up.