“And heroes’ wives,” she playfully added, with a charming smile. “Therefore, you and I will drink it, pledging the enterprise. But we must have some glasses.”
She rang, and presently one of the maids came up, went, and returned again with half a dozen small goblets on a tray.
“Well,” said Muriel, laughing as she looked at the tray, “with six glasses we can drink pledges. Good. Now let us sleep.”
Turning the light low, she unbound her tresses, and lying down with him, kissed his eyelids with soft and dewy kisses.
“Sleep sweetly, my beloved,” she murmured. “It is the fourth night. A very little night, but the fifth night will be sweet and long, and full of rest.”
He did not reply, but gently kissed her, and with their souls stilled with ineffable tenderness they sank away together in a slumber, innocent and sweet as that of childhood.
The room was dim around that tranquil rest, and the faint light softly showed the forms of the reposing lovers. Locked in each other’s arms, with the snowy films drooping from the golden ring in the ceiling in long and flowing festoons around them, they lay like some fair picture of immortal love and peace shadowed within the clear depths of a magic mirror in a light of darkling dawn.
An hour melted slowly by, and during that hour, folded to her bosom, and breathing the balm of her parted lips, the rest of Harrington was sweet and deep. Then a strange dream outgrew upon his brain from the oblivion of his slumber.
He was running cautiously along a vaulted archway of the rude Saxon architecture, toward a flight of five or six stone steps, which led up into the open air. It was in Saxon England, in some time of trouble, and he was a young Saxon. He saw himself clothed in a short, brown tunic, belted at the waist, and reaching nearly to the knees, which were bare, and with leather buskins on his feet. As it often happens in dreams, he both was that figure, and saw it. It was himself, but utterly unlike himself both in aspect and character. The head was uncovered, save by short, dark, curling hair; the face was youthful, unbearded, mild and timid in expression, with the cheeks rather wan; and the figure was that of a slight and strengthless stripling. A sense of general carnage was in the air of the dream, and it seemed as if in that form, he was seeking to escape from enemies. Too gentle and weak in nature to feel violent fear, he had only a timorous and innocent apprehension of his danger; and in this mood, running on to the steps, and ascending, suddenly the opening of the archway filled with armed warriors, and as he shrank on the point of turning to flee, their long axes fell upon him, and he was slain.