"Nor to whom his long visits in Yorkshire were made?"
"How should I? No confidence existed between us. I was indifferent to all his movements; not imagining that they could in any degree interest me."
"I begin to see my way through this tangled maze," returned George, musingly. "I now understand the secluded manner in which you have been brought up; and their reasons for keeping you a prisoner within these walls. They have an important game to play, in which they do not want you to act a conspicuous part. I can whisper a secret into your ears well worth the knowing--ay, and the keeping, too. Geoffrey Moncton, you are this Sir Alexander"s _heir_!"
A sudden thrill shot through my whole frame. It was not pleasure, for at that moment I felt sad enough; nor hope, for I had long accustomed myself to look only on the dark side of the picture. It was, I fear, revenge; a burning desire to pay back the insults and injuries I had received from Theophilus Moncton, and to frustrate the manoeuvres of his designing father.
"Has Sir Alexander no children?"
"He has a daughter--an only daughter, a fair, fragile girl of sixteen; the n.o.blest, the most disinterested of her s.e.x; a creature as talented as she is beautiful. Margaretta Moncton is destined to be the wife of her cousin Theophilus."
"Does he love her?"
"How can you ask that question, knowing the man, and after having read the note addressed to your uncle?"
"That note was signed A---- M----."
"It was written by an unhappy, infatuated creature, whom Theophilus _did_ love, if such a pa.s.sion as his callous bosom can feel, deserves the name; but he shall not escape my vengeance. The arrow is in the bow, and a punishment as terrible as his crime, shall overtake him yet."
"Oh, that you would enter more fully into these dark details. You are ingenious at tormenting. I am bewildered and lost amid these half disclosures."
"Hush, Geoffrey! these walls have ears. I, too, am tortured, maddened by your questions. You are too imprudent--too impulsive, to trust with matters of such vital importance; I have revealed too much already. Try and forget the events of this morning; nor let your uncle discover by look, word or gesture, that you are in possession of his secret. He is deeply offended with his son, not on account of his base conduct to this poor orphan girl, but because it is likely to hinder his marriage with Miss Moncton, which has been for years the idol wish of his heart.
His morose spirit, once aroused, is deadly and implacable; and in order to make Theophilus feel the full weight of his anger, he may call you to fill his vacant place."
The sound of Mr. Moncton"s step in the pa.s.sage put a sudden stop to our conversation, but enough had been said to rouse my curiosity to the highest pitch; and I tried in vain to lift the dark veil of futurity--to penetrate the mysteries that its folds concealed.
CHAPTER X.
DREAMS.
I went to bed early, and tried in vain to sleep. The events of the day pa.s.sed continually through my brain, and brought on a nervous headache.
All the blood in my body seemed concentrated in my head, leaving my feet and hands paralyzed with cold. After tossing about for many hours, I dropped off into a sort of mesmeric sleep, full of confused images, among which the singular face of Dinah North haunted me like the genius of the night-mare.
Dreams are one of the greatest mysteries in the unsolved problem of life. I have been a dreamer from my cradle, and if any person could explain the phenomena, the practical experience of a long life ought to have invested me with that power.
Most persons, in spite of themselves, or what they consider to be their better judgment, attach a superst.i.tious importance to these visions of the night; nor is the vague belief in the spiritual agency employed in dreams, diminished by the remarkable dreams and their fulfilment, which are recorded in Holy Writ, the verity of which we are taught to believe as an article of faith.
My eyes are scarcely closed in sleep, before I become an actor in scenes of the most ludicrous or terrific nature. All my mental and physical faculties become intensified, and enjoy the highest state of perfection; as if the soul centered in itself the qualities of its mysterious triune existence.
Beautiful visions float before the sight, such as the waking eye never beheld; and the ear is ravished with music which no earthly skill could produce. The dreaming sense magnifies all sounds and sights which exist in nature. The thunder deepens its sonorous tone, ocean sends up a louder voice, and the whirlwind shakes the bending forest with tenfold fury.
I have beheld in sleep the mountains reel; the yawning earth disclose her hidden depths, and the fiery abyss swarm with hideous forms, which no waking eye could contemplate, and the mind retain its rationality. I have beheld the shrinking sea yield up the dead of ages, and have found myself a guilty and condemned wretch, trembling at the bar of Eternal Justice.
"Oh! what have I not beheld in sleep?"
I have been shut up, a living sentient creature in the cold, dank, noisome grave; have felt the loathsome worm slide along my warm, quivering limbs; the toad find a resting-place upon my breast; the adder wreath her slimy folds round my swelling throat; have struggled against the earthly weight that pressed out my soul and palsied my bursting heart, with superhuman strength; but every effort to free myself from my prison of clay was made in vain. My lips were motionless; my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth and refused to send forth a sound. Hope was extinct. I was beyond the reach of human aid; and that mental agony rendered me as powerless, as a moth in the grasp of a giant.
I have stood upon the edge of the volcano, and listened to the throbbings of Nature"s fiery heart; and heard the boiling blood of earth, chafing and roaring far below; while my eyes vainly endeavoured to explore its glowing depths. Anon, by some fatal necessity, I was compelled to cross this terrible abyss--my bridge, a narrow plank insecurely placed upon the rounded stems of two yielding, sapling trees. Suddenly, frightful cries resounded on every side, and I was pursued by fiend-like forms in the shape of animal life. I put my foot upon the fearful bridge, I tried its strength, and felt a horrid consciousness that I never could pa.s.s over it in safety; my supernatural enemies drew nearer--I saw their blazing eyes--heard their low muttered growls; the next moment I leaped upon the plank--with a loud crash it severed--and with the velocity of thought, I was plunged headlong into the boiling gulf--down--down--down--for ever whirling down--the hot flood rushed over me. I felt the spasmodic grasp of death upon my throat, and awoke struggling with eternity upon the threshold of time.
Most persons of a reflective character, have kept a diary of the ordinary occurrences of life. I reversed this time-honoured mental exercise; and for some months, noted down what I could remember of the transactions of the mind, during its sleeping hours.
So wild and strange were these records, so eccentric the vagaries of the soul during its nocturnal wanderings, that I was induced to abandon the task, lest some friend hereafter, might examine, the mystic scroll, and conclude that it was written by a maniac.
It happened, that on the present night, I was haunted by a dream of more than ordinary wildness.
I dreamt that I stood in the centre of a boundless plain of sand, which undulated beneath my feet like the waves of the sea. Presently, I heard the rushing of a mighty wind, and as the whirl-blast swept over the desert, clouds of sand were driven before it, and I was lifted off my feet, and carried along the tide of dust as lightly as a leaf is whirled onward through the air. All objects fled as I advanced, and each moment increased the velocity of my flight.
A vast forest extended its gloomy arms athwart the horizon; but did not arrest my aerial journey. The thick boughs groaned and crashed beneath me, as I was dragged through their matted foliage; my limbs lacerated and torn, and my hair tangled amid the th.o.r.n.y branches. Vainly I endeavoured to cling to the twigs which impeded my pa.s.sage, but they eluded my frenzied grasp, or snapped in my hands, while my cries for help were drowned in the thundering sweep of the mighty gale.
Onward--onward. I was still flying onward without the aid of wings.
There seemed no end to that interminable flight.
At length, when I least expected a change, I was suddenly cast to the bottom of a deep pit. The luxury of repose to my wounded and exhausted frame, was as grateful and refreshing as the dews of heaven to the long parched earth. I lay in a sort of pleasing helplessness, too glad to escape from past perils to imagine a recurrence of the same evil.
While dreamily watching the swallows, tending their young in the holes of the sandy bank that formed the walls of my prison, I observed the sand at the bottom of the pit caught up in little eddies and whirling round and round. A sickening feeling of dread stole over me, and I crouched down in an agony of fear, and clung with all my strength to the tufts of th.o.r.n.y shrubs which clothed the sides of the pit.
Again the wind-fiend caught me up on his broad pinions, and I was once more traversing with lightning speed the azure deserts of air. A burning heat was in my throat--my eyes seemed bursting from their sockets; confused sounds were murmuring in my ears, and the very blackness of darkness swallowed me up. No longer carried upward, I was now rapidly descending from some tremendous height. I stretched forth my hands to grasp some tangible substance in order to break the horrors of that fall, but all above, around, and beneath me, was empty air;--the effort burst the chains of that ghastly slumber, and I awoke with a short stifled cry of terror, exclaiming with devotional fervour, "Thank G.o.d! it is only a dream!"
The damp dews stood in large drops upon my brow, my hands were tightly clenched, and every hair upon my head seemed stiffened and erect with fear.
"Thank G.o.d!" I once more exclaimed in an agony of grat.i.tude, "it is only a dream!"
Then arose the question: "What was the import of this dream, the effects of which I still felt through all my trembling frame, in the violent throbbing of my heart, and the ghastly cessation of every emotion save that of horror?"
Then I began to ponder, as I had done a thousand times before, over the mysterious nature of dreams, the manner in which they had been employed by the Almighty to communicate important truths to mankind, until I came to the conclusion that dreams were revelations from the spirit land, to warn us of dangers which threatened, or to punish us for crimes committed in the flesh.
"What are the visions which haunt the murderer"s bed," I thought, "but phantoms of the past recalled by memory and conscience, and invested with an actual presence in sleep?"
Dr. Young, that melancholy dreamer of sublime dreams, has said--
"If dreams infest the grave, I wake emerging from a sea of dreams."
What a terrible idea of future punishment is contained in these words to one, whose sleep like mine is haunted by unutterable terrors! Think of an eternity of dreaming horrors. A h.e.l.l condensed within the narrow resting-place of the grave.
My reveries were abruptly dispelled by the sound of steps along the pa.s.sage which led to my chamber. My heart began to beat audibly. It was the dead hour of the night--who could be waking at such an unusual time? I sat up in the bed and listened.
I heard voices: two persons were talking in a loud tone in the pa.s.sage, that was certain. For a long time, I could not distinguish one word from another, until my own name was suddenly p.r.o.nounced in a louder key; and in a voice which seemed perfectly familiar to my ears.
The garret in which I slept, was a long, low, dingy apartment which formed a sort of repository for all the worn-out law books and waste papers belonging to the office, and as I have before stated the only furniture it possessed, was a mean truckle-bed on which I slept, and a large iron chest, which Mr. Moncton had informed me, contained t.i.tle-deeds and other valuable papers, of which he himself kept the key.
They were kept in my apartment for better security; as the stair which led to the flat roof of the house opened into that chamber, and in case of fire, the chest and its contents could be easily removed.
For a wonder, I had never felt the least curiosity about the chest and its contents.
It stood in the old place, the day I first entered that dismal apartment when a child; and during the many long years which had slowly intervened, I never recollected having seen it unclosed. My attention for the first time was drawn to its existence by hearing my uncle say to some one in the pa.s.sage in a hurried under tone.