“Whenever I can be useful, sir.”
“For instance, the night before I am married!
I am sure I shall not be able to sleep. Will
you promise to sit up with me to bear me company?
To you I can talk of my lovely one: for now
you have seen her and know her.”
“Yes, sir.”
“She’s a rare one, is she not, Jane?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A strapper — a real strapper, Jane:
big, brown, and buxom; with hair just such as the
ladies of Carthage must have had. Bless me!
there’s Dent and Lynn in the stables! Go
in by the shrubbery, through that wicket.”
As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him
in the yard, saying cheerfully —
“Mason got the start of you all this morning;
he was gone before sunrise: I rose at four to
see him off.”
Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies;
and so are signs; and the three combined make one
mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.
I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because
I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies,
I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant,
long-absent, wholly estranged relatives asserting,
notwithstanding their alienation, the unity of the
source to which each traces his origin) whose workings
baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught
we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man.
When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one
night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that
she had been dreaming about a little child; and that
to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either
to one’s self or one’s kin. The saying
might have worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance
immediately followed which served indelibly to fix
it there. The next day Bessie was sent for home
to the deathbed of her little sister.
Of late I had often recalled this saying and this
incident; for during the past week scarcely a night
had gone over my couch that had not brought with it
a dream of an infant, which I sometimes hushed in
my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched
playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling
its hands in running water. It was a wailing
child this night, and a laughing one the next:
now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me;
but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever
aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive
nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of
slumber.
I did not like this iteration of one idea —
this strange recurrence of one image, and I grew nervous
as bedtime approached and the hour of the vision drew
near. It was from companionship with this baby-phantom
I had been roused on that moonlight night when I heard
the cry; and it was on the afternoon of the day following
I was summoned downstairs by a message that some one
wanted me in Mrs. Fairfax’s room. On repairing
thither, I found a man waiting for me, having the
appearance of a gentleman’s servant: he
was dressed in deep mourning, and the hat he held
in his hand was surrounded with a crape band.
