Page:Weird Tales v02 n01 (1923-07-08).djvu/83

82 He stopped and sat up, one long hand covering his eyes. Jugrand waited. It was very still.

Suddenly, the wind awakened. Craddock started, and rose unsteadily to his feet.

"I fear I have been very discourteous," he said, in his natural tones. "I seem to have been asleep. I must have dreamed, too."

"How much of your dream do you remember?" the psychologist asked.

The surgeon stared fixedly ahead of him. At last, he shook his head.

"None; none, whatever," he declared. "Before you questioned me, I could have sworn it was in my mind. But there is not a thing now that I can lay hold of."

His gaze wandered, and reached the face in the coffin. He advanced a few steps, and looked down, absorbedly. His pale, vivid countenance regarded one that was paler, though hardly more still; whose fire was gone.

Very gently, the psychologist touched him on the shoulder, his voice rumbling softly beneath the beating of the wind:

"You spoke at intervals in your sleep—an old man—brown smoke from a chimney—Lucia—Do you remember now?"

A shiver passed through the surgeon; a long, subtle undulation of the senses. He answered in a whisper, his gaze still bent on the unchanging features of Doctor Sawyer:

"I remember."

Jugrand's blue eyes gleamed. His voice was heavy with controlled emotion.

"Tell it!" he whispered.

His notebook was out. He drew up a chair and waited, saying no further word that might break the spell. Craddock's eyes had not left the face in the coffin. After a time, he began to talk. They did not leave it then.

Thus it was, in the far end of that strange night—in the windy dawn—that Craddock told his dream.

OCTOR WILFORD SAWYER'S step tottered a little, as he left the train. He was a thin, tremulous old man, with eager eyes.

Though the weight of recent illness bore heavily upon him, the spirit had power to hold him to his purpose. He looked with a child's wide gaze at the village he was entering.

So far as his memory served, it was entirely unfamiliar. Yet no native could have proceeded with more, apparent certainty. He barely hesitated by the rail-road right-of-way, sizing up the crowd of houses huddled about the one general store, their back yards elbowing off the insistent forest; then he started forward confidently, and struck into a little zig-zag path which led off among the trees.

He felt strangely buoyant. Something within him sang and shouted, so that he had to restrain himself from giving echoing expression to its exuberance. His feet, accustomed to city pavements, trod the live turf as if that were the one carpet they had always known. The trees seemed companionable; old friends, almost. When the path ran closely enough between them, he stretched out his hands to touch their trunks, one on each side, and thrilled with the feel of their shaggy bark.

Even the rapid twilight failed to shake his sense of comfortable security. He lost the path, but continued on between the trees. Night began to muffle them, but he kept on, breathlessly. Stars budded above their tops before his wanderings brought him definitely, at last, to the edge of a broad valley.

A nearly circular amphitheatre spread before him. It had been leveled of trees, but the giant forests rose, tier after tier, on the hills around it. From behind the uttermost of these hills, the moon had risen, and the nearer half of the valley's waving grass glistened in its light, though the farther portion still slept in the shadow.

The doctor gazed at this scene with an amazement which gripped him by the throat, as sometimes the first breath of ether had done, when he had hurried into an operating room, out of the cold air. The beauty and poetry of that dim landscape entered his blood. But at last his eyes broke with the subtle moonlight of the valley, and fixed themselves, instead, on that which lay in the valley's center. It was a house—a long, low mansion, of stately yet irregular design.

The place seemed entirely dark. While he stared, however, a chink of light appeared for an instant. And, as his gaze focused more precisely, he perceived a ribbon of brown smoke which twisted lazily upward in the moonlit haze, and dissolved into the background of the hills.

It may have been a moment that he stood motionless at the edge of the valley. It may have been an hour. For that space, whatever it was, he had shaken off the trammels of time. His heart was laid open, as if some super-surgeon had stolen upon him in the moonlight. He was waiting. When that which he awaited came, he felt it as a thrill within his breast, which compelled him to rush eagerly down the valley's slope, and to stop, breathless, before the door of the mansion. It moved him, then, to lift the ancient knocker, and send the echoes in a multitudinous, prying battalion down the dark hallways within.

He had sent them again before heavy footsteps responded. There was the scraping of a bar, and the sound of chains unloosing; and the door opened.

The doctor bowed, gravely, in the moonlight; and the old man in the doorway also bowed, with an even graver courtesy. He was a giant of a man, whose long, white beard and slightly bent shoulders, proclaimed his years. In the yellow light of the candle he carried, his eyes gleamed with sombre vigor. Though the hand which held the candle shook, his voice was free from the cackling quality of age. It was deep and booming, rather, like the sea.

"You are welcome, sir," he said, simply after a moment's scrutiny, "Will you be pleased to enter?"

For the space of a breath, just at that instant, the doctor's sense of security failed him. He placed his hand on his heart, with the gesture of a very sick man, and began to apologize:

"I can't intrude upon you in this way, I can't—"

But the old man interrupted him, repeating:

"Be pleased to enter, sir."

With that, the thrill swept again through the doctor's soul. His pulses trembled. There was a solemn enthusiasm, very deep within him. He bowed, and stepped over the threshold.

"I will secure the door, if you will pardon me," the old man observed, punctiliously.

Having done so, he shuffled ahead into the soft, brown gloom of the hallway. They passed dark chambers on either side, into each of which the candle thrust a flitting yellow finger; but there was no other light until, still advancing, they turned into a room at the end of the passage.

The doctor paused a moment in the doorway. The thrill was beating rhythmically on his brain. He strained his eyes until they ached sharply, in an unreasonable effort to accomplish with them something which he could not have defined; but they merely registered, unforgettably, the details of the scene before him.

What he saw was a room, with a lofty, broad-beamed ceiling, and walls of shadowy paneled oak. Against the walls, in stiff attitudes, a trio of high-backed chairs stood guard. In a dark corner hid an idle spinning-wheel. A long, wooden bench stretched itself in the warmth before the fireplace—with a little, old lady sitting precisely in the middle of it. And over the whole, dividing the shadows from the mellow