Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/117

 70 the sleeping baby then into his little cot, interrupted with a ridiculing word.

“Dreams, indeed! One would suppose you were some old nurse, Jane! How you can dwell upon that absurdity still, and repeat it, I cannot understand. Lady Oakburn is staring at you—and well she may!”

“At any rate we have never heard of Clarice since that dream,” was Jane’s answer, and her low earnest voice told how much the subject affected her. “When Clarice shall be restored to us, safe and well, then I will forget my dream.”

Laura threw up her supercilious head, and turned her back on Jane. “I must put my things on,” she remarked to the countess; “your servants and horses will think I am not coming. I sent orders down to them to wait when they brought back Jane.”

Jane had seen the look of surprise on Lady Oakburn’s face, and spoke after a pause. “I ought to tell you, Lady Oakburn, as a sort of answer to Laura’s ridicule, that in the course of my past life three or four most singular dreams have visited me. They have borne a strange coincidence—to say the least of it—with speedily following events. I am not by nature superstitious; I believe that I was born the reverse of it; but it is impossible but these dreams should have fixed themselves on my mind, as something neither to be accounted for nor understood.”

“And you had one of these singular dreams relating to Lady Clarice?”

“I had. She was not Lady Clarice then. It was a very dreadful dream, and it appeared to shadow forth her death. Hour by hour, day by day, the dream, taken in conjunction with Clarice’s prolonged disappearance, becomes more vivid to my memory. I cannot forget it.

“What was it?” asked Lady Oakburn.

“I would prefer not to tell it you,” replied Jane. “Sometimes I think that if I related it to Laura she would ridicule it less.”

“You have not related it to her?”

“No. To her, of all others, my tongue is tied.”

“But why to her in particular, Lady Jane?”

“Well, the cause is—but it sounds foolish even in my own ears when spoken of, so what must it to a listener? The fact is—and a very curious fact it is, one which I cannot understand—that in this dream Mr. Carlton, Laura’s present husband, was most unpleasantly prominent. The details I say I cannot give you, but I dreamt Clarice was dead—I dreamt that she appeared to me dead, and that she indicated Mr. Carlton as being the cause of her death or in some manner aiding in it.”

The countess’s mind was entirely free from superstition, and in a silent, inwardly polite manner she had been wondering at Lady Jane. But the awe on the latter’s countenance, the hushed voice, the solemnity in Jane’s words, served to impart its own impression to her, and she felt inclined to have a fit of the shivers.

“He was not Laura’s husband then, but I was in the habit of seeing him daily, for he was my father’s medical attendant; and I argue with myself that that fact, the seeing him so frequently, caused him to be mixed up in the dream. I argue that it must have been a purely accidental coincidence; but in spite of this, in spite of myself, my reason, my judgment, I cannot get that sight of Mr. Carlton, as I saw him in the dream, from my mind; and ever since that moment I have felt a sort of horror of Mr. Carlton. I cannot expect you, Lady Oakburn, to excuse this, or to understand it; 1 feel myself that it is very wrong.”

“But did Mr. Carlton know your sister Clarice?" demanded the countess, growing strangely interested.

“Certainly not. And therefore my reason and good sense stand in condemnation against me, while the feeling, the horror, remains. I did once mention this to Laura—that Mr. Carlton was mixed up most unpleasantly in the dream, and that I could not help regarding him with a sort of shrinking dread, but I fancy she has forgotten it. It was before her marriage. At any rate, what with this, and what with Laura’s general ridicule of such things, I never care to allude to the dream in her presence. I never should allude to it but as an explanation of the cause why I grew uneasy and wrote to Clarice those letters, which have never been answered.”

“Won’t you relate me the dream?” asked the countess, in her interest. “I confess I am no believer in the theory some entertain, that dreams are sent as warnings; I fear I ridicule them as heartily as Lady Laura; but I should like to hear this one.”

Jane shook her head. “I have never told it to any one. Pardon me, Lady Oakburn, if I still decline to repeat it to you. Independent of my own unconquerable repugnance, I do not think it would be fair to Mr. Carlton.”

Lady Oakburn could not forbear a smile, and Jane saw it.

“Yes,” she said in answer, “I know how foolish all this must seem to you. It is foolish; and I should be thankful if I could overget the prejudice it has given me against Mr. Carlton, That prejudice is the most foolish of all. I feel how unjustifiable it is, and yet——”

Another dreamer interrupted them: the