Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/333

 326 False pride made me ashamed of my anxiety. Even then, after the loss of one precious moment, I should have followed, but the Squire called to me, candle in hand, from his study door, to say something about to-morrow’s pike-fishing, and the opportunity was lost—for ever! What might not then have been the magic power of one word of real kindness and contrition?—it might have altered the whole current of an existence.

That has been one long and unavailing regret. But the word remained unspoken. I went to my chamber, a quaint room in one of the wings, close to the gray turret where, beneath its conical roof of slate, the alarm bell hung. I slowly undressed, often drawing aside the curtains, often peering forth through the Elizabethan casement of diamond panes, many of which were darkened by the heavy growth of the rank ivy without. All was ghostly still in the garden below, where the stiff hedges of clipped holly, the terraces fringed with box-trees and hornbeam, and the broad, old-fashioned walks were white with moonshine. An owl was hooting in the wood, and the mastiff in the courtyard bayed mournfully from time to time, and rattled his chain. The moon was high and bright, but black clouds were sailing across the sky; and as I looked, a sudden glow lit up the horizon, as if a trap-door had been opened above some fiery gulf, then vanished as quickly. “There will be a storm to-night,” I muttered, as I turned from the window for the last time. I was very ill-satisfied with myself, and, as often happens, I perversely chose to justify my own conduct by blaming poor Ellen. “She had no right to be so positive and so petulant,” I said to myself. It augured ill for our future happiness that she should resent idle words so deeply. But in the morning I would speak to her, reason with her—in the morning? We are blind, blind!

My prediction that there would be a storm that night was fulfilled to the letter. A storm there was. I was awakened by a peal of thunder that sounded in my sleeping ears as if the trumpet of the archangel were calling sinners to judgment. Crash upon crash, roar upon roar, till the vault of Heaven was full of the giant sound, and the strong stone mansion rocked like a living creature in fear. The blaze of the lightning, broad and bright, flooded the whole sky with an incessant lurid red, and between the stunning bursts of the thunder might be heard the howl of the wind and the hurtling of the hail and rain. An awful night. A night for shipwreck and ruin, and death of travellers on lonely moorland roads, and toppling down of gray steeples that had mocked at the gales of centuries. A grim, wild night. Presently the thunder died away, all but a sullen growl afar off, and the flashes ceased, and rain and wind went on lashing and tearing at the casement.

I fell asleep, and a strange dream I had. I dreamt of the high peak of Idris, with its storm-lashed terrace of mossy stone, the cairn of loose pebbles, and the rocky chair, deep cut in the very brow of the horrid cliff, with a yawning precipice below. And the chair was not empty. No. It had a tenant, and that tenant bore a female shape. I could see the white robe fluttering through the blackness of night, and the loosened hair, and the hand that was pressed to the eyes, as if to shut out some ghastly sight of things unspeakable, while its fellow grasped the rocky rim of the throne. Then the thunder bellowed over head, and the lightning flashed in fiery forks and hissing zigzags, ringing the hill-top with a flaming diadem, blazing, red and menacing, through the abyss below, and illuminating with a dreadful light that solitary form, alone amid the wrath of the elements. The tempest broke in its might upon the peak of Idris; hail, rain, wind, swept the mountain as with a besom, and the pale form in the fantastic chair endured them all. Strange, unearthly shrieks were blended with the howl of the wind; wild and dismal pageants trooped by amid the driving mists and sheets of blinding rain; and by one last glare of the lightning I saw the figure remove the hand that hid its face. The face of a young girl—of Ellen!—but so ghastly with terror, so full of agony and nameless horror, that I awoke, trembling and unnerved, with great heat-drops on my forehead, such as excessive bodily pain might have called forth. The storm still raged, but more feebly. Yes, it was subsiding now. I sank back again, but this time into a heavy, dreamless slumber. I woke in the golden, brilliant morning: the sky was blue, the birds were singing gaily, and the verdure of the country seemed fresher and fairer than before the storm. My spirits rose as I dressed; I was in the best of tempers, and I made a resolution that I would not chide Ellen for her wilful conduct of the preceding evening, but would be very considerate and kind, and would even say I was sorry to have hurt her feelings by a careless word. I went down to the breakfast-room. The Squire was there, with his two elder daughters and his eldest son, while young Herbert came in with his fishing-rod a moment later. But no Ellen. The old butler brought in the urn, after we had exchanged a few remarks, and then, for the first time, Ellen’s absence was commented upon.

“She is not usually the lazy one,” said her father. “Owen, send up Miss Ellen’s maid to let her know we are waiting breakfast.”

The man went. We chatted on. But Owen came back with a blank look to say, that the maid had found the door locked, and that she had knocked repeatedly, but without getting an answer.

This astonished us all.

“She must be ill!” cried Charlotte, the eldest sister, hastily leaving the room.

Soon she, too, came back, to say that she had called aloud at the door, but that Ellen would not reply a word.

“Perhaps she has gone out;” said Herbert. “The window in the oratory that opens out of her room leads right on to the terrace by the greenhouse, and then there are steps to the garden.”

“Nonsense,” said the Squire, knitting his brows, “that door has been locked these fifty years, and the key lost, too. I’ll go myself. I’m afraid she is ill.”