The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett
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of a pleasant graveyard which surrounded a tiny country church in the outskirts of a pretty little village. It was in the early summer, and the foliage was green above him as the boughs swayed gently to and fro in the morning breeze. The birds were singing gayly as they flitted about over his head. The bees hummed along from flower to flower. At last, so it seemed to him, he had come into a land of peace and quiet, where there was rest and comfort and where no man need go in fear of his life. It was a country where vengeance was not a duty and where midnight combats were not a custom he found himself smiling as he thought that a grisly dragon and a goblin rider would be equally out of place in this laughing landscape.
Then the bell in the steeple of the little church began to ring merrily, and he rose to his feet in expectation. All of a sudden the knowledge came to him why it was that they were ringing. He wondered then why the coming of the bride was thus delayed. He knew himself to be a lover, with life opening brightly before him; and the world seemed to him sweeter than ever before and more beautiful.
Then at last the girl whom he loved with his whole heart and who had promised to marry him appeared in the distance, and he thought he had never seen her look more lovely. As he beheld his bridal party approaching, he slipped into the church to await her at the altar. The sunshine fell full upon the portal and made a halo about the girl’s head as she crossed the threshold.
But even when the bride stood by his side and the clergyman had begun the solemn service of the church the bells kept on, and soon their chiming became a clangor, louder and sharper and more insistent.
VII
So clamorous and so persistent was the ringing that Cosmo Waynflete was roused at last. He found himself suddenly standing on his feet, with his hand clutching the back of the chair in which he had been sitting before the fire when the rays of the setting sun had set long ago. The room was dark, for it was lighted now only by the embers of the burnt-out fire; and the electric bell was ringing steadily, as though the man outside the door had resolved to waken the seven sleepers.
Then Cosmo Waynflete was wide-awake again; and he knew where he was once more—not in Japan, not in Persia, not in Lisbon, not in Sleepy Hollow, but here in New York, in his own room, before his own fire. He opened the door at once and admitted his friend, Paul Stuyvesant.
“It isn’t dinner-time, is it?” he asked. “I’m not late, am I? The fact is, I’ve been asleep.”
“It is so good of you to confess that,” his friend answered, laughing; “although the length of time you kept me waiting and ringing might have led me to suspect it. No, you are not late and it is not dinner-time. I’ve come around to have another little chat with you before dinner, that’s all.”
“Take this chair, old man,” said Cosmo, as he threw another hickory-stick on the fire. Then he lighted the gas and sat down by the side of his friend.
“This chair is comfortable, for a fact,” Stuyvesant declared, stretching himself out luxuriously. “No wonder you went to sleep. What did you dream of?—strange places you had seen in your travels or the homely scenes of your native land.”
Waynflete looked at his friend for a moment without answering the question. He was startled as he recalled the extraordinary series of adventures which had fallen to his lot since he had fixed his gaze on the crystal ball. It seemed to him as though he had been whirled through space and through time.
“I suppose every man is always the hero of his own dreams,” he began, doubtfully.
“Of course,” his friend returned; “in sleep our natural and healthy egotism is absolutely unrestrained. It doesn’t make any matter where the scene is laid or whether the play is a comedy or a tragedy, the dreamer has always the centre of the stage, with the calcium light turned full on him.”
“That’s just it,” Waynflete went on; “this dream of mine makes me feel as if I were an actor, and as if I had been playing many parts, one after the other, in the swiftest succession. They are not familiar to me, and yet I confess to a vague feeling of unoriginality. It is as though I were a plagiarist of adventure—if that be a possible supposition. I have just gone through these startling situations myself, and yet I’m sure that they have all of them happened before—although, perhaps, not to any one man. Indeed, no one man could have had all these adventures of mine, because I see now that I have been whisked through the centuries and across the hemispheres with a suddenness possible only in dreams. Yet all my experiences seem somehow second-hand, and not really my own.”
“Picked up here and there—like your bric-à-brac?” suggested Stuyvesant. “But what are these alluring adventures of yours that stretched through the ages and across the continents?”
Then, knowing how fond his friend was of solving mysteries and how proud he was of his skill in this art, Cosmo Waynflete narrated his dream as it has been set down in these pages.
When he had made an end, Paul Stuyvesant’s first remark was: “I’m sorry I happened along just then and waked you up before you had time to get married.”
His second remark followed half a minute later.
“I see how it was,” he said; “you were sitting in this chair and looking at that crystal ball, which focussed the level rays of the setting sun, I suppose? Then it is plain enough—you hypnotized yourself!”
“I have heard that such a thing is possible,” responded Cosmo.”
“Possible?” Stuyvesant returned, “it is certain! But what is more curious is the new way in which you combined your self-hypnotism with crystal-gazing. You have heard of scrying, I suppose?”
“You mean the practice of looking into a drop of water or a crystal ball or anything of that sort,” said Cosmo, “and of seeing things in it—of seeing people moving about?”
“That’s just what I do mean,” his friend returned. “And that’s just what you have been doing. You fixed your gaze on the ball, and so hypnotized yourself; and then, in the intensity of your vision, you were able to see figures in the crystal—with one of which visualized emanations you immediately identified yourself. That’s easy enough, I think. But I don’t see what suggested to you your separate experiences. I recognize them, of course—”
“You recognize them?” cried Waynflete, in wonder.
“I can tell you where you borrowed every one of your adventures,” Stuyvesant replied, “But what I’d like to know now is what suggested to you just those particular characters and situations, and not any of the many others also stored away in your subconsciousness.”
So saying, he began to look about the room.
“My subconsciousness?” repeated Waynflete. “Have I ever been a samurai in my subconsciousness?”
Paul Stuyvesant looked at Cosmo Waynflete for nearly a minute without reply. Then all the answer he made was to say: “That’s a queer dressing-gown you have on.”
“It is time I took it off,” said the other, as he twisted himself out of its clinging folds. “It is a beautiful specimen of weaving, isn’t it? I call it the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador, for although I bought it in a curiosity-shop in Nuremberg, it was once, I really believe, the slumber-robe of an Oriental envoy.”
Stuyvesant took the silken garment from his friend’s hand.
“Why did the Japanese ambassador sell you his dream-gown in a Nuremberg curiosity-shop?” he asked.
“He didn’t,” Waynflete explained. “I never saw the ambassador, and neither did the old German lady who kept the shop. She told me she bought it from a Japanese acrobat who was out of an engagement and desperately hard up. But she told me also that the acrobat had told her that the garment had belonged to an ambassador who had given it to him as a reward of his skill, and that he never would have parted with it if he had not been dead-broke.”
Stuyvesant held the robe up to the light and inspected the embroidery on the skirt of it.
“Yes,” he said,