“Now the God of Love send me my desire.” Then, since it was deemed discreet to make sure of sleep with all speed, Bess rolled the clothes about her, blew out the candle, and flung her black hair away from her over the pillow.
Whether it was a mere trick of the brain or no, or whether the good saint tripped down from heaven on the girl’s behalf, Bess dreamed a dream that night as she lay in her attic with the pine-boughs swaying snow-ladened without her window. It seemed to her that she was gathering herbs for old Ursula amid the ruins of the Abbey of Holy Cross in the woods beside the river. The sun was at full noon, since the roofless refectory was ablaze with light. By the doorway Bess dreamed that she came upon a plant with green and lustrous leaves and a great red bloom shooting up upon a tall, straight stalk. The flower was so fair and strange that she stooped to pluck it, and in the plucking found the petals change to blood. Drawing back in fear, and looking at her red hand, she saw the figure of a man darken the arched doorway. He stood there looking at Bess in silence, with a peculiar expression of pain upon his brown and boyish face. Bess took notice even in her dream that he was dressed in black and had white ruffles at his wrists. As she wondered where she had seen the face before, the man vanished away from her without a word, and St. Agnes’s dreamer awoke in her bed.
She lay still, yet shivering a little, the vision still playing before her eyes. A low wind had risen, and she could hear it moving in the boughs of the trees without. Beams of moonlight came slanting through the casement to shine upon the polished panelling of an old cupboard that stood against the wall. The cottage seemed utterly still and dark. Bess started up in bed on her elbow of a sudden, her hair falling down upon the pillow, her eyes shining even in the dusk of the room.
Surely she had heard a shower of pebbles rattling against her window. The pine-boughs had been lopped but a week ago by Dan because they smote the glass when the wind blew. She sat up with the bedclothes looped about her waist, and her shift showing her big white arms and full round throat. As she listened there came a second pattering of stones against the casement. Bess, slipping out of bed and pulling on her stockings, threw her red cloak over her shoulders and crept across the room to the window.
Slipping the catch, she thrust open the frame and peered out, with her head on a level with the swaying boughs. The carpeting of snow stretched clear and brilliant under the moon to end in the murk where the woods thickened, and there was no sound save the soughing of the wind in the trees. Bess’s eyes hardened as she leaned over the sill. She gave a short, sharp cry, and drew back as though to close the casement.
“Bess,” came a gruff whisper up the wall.
There was trampled snow under the window. A man was standing there in the moonlight, the upper part of his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. A dwarfed and exaggerated silhouette of his broad and burly figure was thrown by the moon’s light upon the snow. He was standing with one arm against the wall, while his head was but six feet or less below the ledge of the low window.
“Bess.”
The girl leaned out again, and looked down into the man’s face.
“Is that you, Dan?”