The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett
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represent the outline of a spring of water, but I don’t see what that has to do with my dream,” Waynflete answered.
“Don’t you?” Stuyvesant returned. “Then I’ll show you. You had on this silk garment embroidered here with an outline of the well in which was washed the head of Kotsuke no Suke, the man whom the Forty-Seven Ronins killed. You know the story?”
“I read it in Japan, but—” began Cosmo.
“You had that story stored away in your subconsciousness,” interrupted his friend. “And when you hypnotized yourself by peering into the crystal ball, this embroidery it was which suggested to you to see yourself as the hero of the tale—Oishi Kuranosuke, the chief of the Forty-Seven Ronins, the faithful follower who avenged his master by pretending to be vicious and dissipated—just like Brutus and Lorenzaccio—until the enemy was off his guard and open to attack.”
“I think I do recall the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronins, but only very vaguely,” said the hero of the dream. “For all I know I may have had the adventure of Oishi Kuranosuke laid on the shelf somewhere in my subconsciousness, as you want me to believe. But how about my Persian dragon and my Iberian noblewoman?”
Paul Stuyvesant was examining the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador with minute care. Suddenly he said, “Oh!” and then he looked up at Cosmo Waynflete and asked: “What are those buttons? They seem to be old coins.”
“They are old coins,” the other answered; “it was a fancy of mine to utilize them on that Japanese dressing-gown. They are all different, you see. The first is—”
“Persian, isn’t it?” interrupted Stuyvesant.
“Yes,” Waynflete explained, “it is a Persian daric. And the second is a Spanish peso made at Potosi under Philip II. for use in America. And the third is a York shilling, one of the coins in circulation here in New York at the time of the Revolution—I got that one, in fact, from the farmer who ploughed it up in a field at Tarrytown, near Sunnyside.”
“Then there are three of your adventures accounted for, Cosmo, and easily enough,” Paul commented, with obvious satisfaction at his own explanation. “Just as the embroidery on the silk here suggested to you—after you had hypnotized yourself—that you were the chief of the Forty-Seven Ronins, so this first coin here in turn suggested to you that you were Rustem, the hero of the ‘Epic of Kings.’ You have read the ‘Shah-Nameh?’”
“I remember Firdausi’s poem after a fashion only,” Cosmo answered. “Was not Rustem a Persian Hercules, so to speak?”
“That’s it precisely,” the other responded, “and he had seven labors to perform; and you dreamed the third of them, the slaying of the grisly dragon. For my own part, I think I should have preferred the fourth of them, the meeting with the lovely enchantress; but that’s neither here nor there.”
“It seems to me I do recollect something about that fight of Rustem and the strange beast. The faithful horse’s name was Rakush, wasn’t it?” asked Waynflete.
“If you can recollect the ‘Shah-Nameh,’” Stuyvesant pursued, “no doubt you can recall also Beaumont and Fletcher’s ‘Custom of the Country?’ That’s where you got the midnight duel in Lisbon and the magnanimous mother, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know,” the other declared.
“Well, you did, for all that,” Paul went on. “The situation is taken from one in a drama of Calderon’s, and it was much strengthened in the taking. You may not now remember having read the play, but the incident must have been familiar to you, or else your subconsciousness couldn’t have yielded it up to you so readily at the suggestion of the Spanish coin, could it?”
“I did read a lot of Elizabethan drama in my senior year at college,” admitted Cosmo, “and this piece of Beaumont and Fletcher’s may have been one of those I read; but I totally fail to recall now what it was all about.”
“You won’t have the cheek to declare that you don’t remember the ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ will you?” asked Stuyvesant. “Very obviously it was the adventure of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman that the York shilling suggested to you.”
“I’ll admit that I do recollect Irving’s story now,” the other confessed.
“So the embroidery on the dream-gown gives the first of your strange situations; and the three others were suggested by the coins you have been using as buttons,” said Paul Stuyvesant. “There is only one thing now that puzzles me: that is the country church and the noon wedding and the beautiful bride.”
And with that he turned over the folds of the silken garment that hung over his arm.
Cosmo Waynflete hesitated a moment and a blush mantled his cheek. Then he looked his friend in the face and said: “I think I can account for my dreaming about her—I can account for that easily enough.”
“So can I,” said Paul Stuyvesant, as he held up the photograph of a lovely American girl that he had just found in the pocket of the dream-gown of the Japanese ambassador.
THE MAN IN THE MIRROR, by Lillian B. Hunt
In the twinkling of an eye, he shot past me. The reception-hall was shaded, but the massive gilt mirror at the far end, scintillating under twin clusters of light, caught his image and held it for an instant.
A clean-cut fellow he was, an artist in appearance, slender and agile—a young man with a face at once fascinating and repellent. The features showed the ravages of dissipation, of poverty, and unfulfilled ambition. The cheeks were hollow and of a bluish pallor; the eyes wildly startled, like those of the hunted deer.
Under the rembrandt, banded with black, hung straight, wet wisps of hair whose tawny glint harmonized well with the stains of modeling clay on hands and sculptor’s apron. But what startled me most in that brief glimpse of him was a great wound in the center of his forehead, seared and livid, like the brand of a murderer.
For a quarter hour at least I had been pacing the open conservatory in the right wing of the reception-hall which, in the form of a broad balcony, overlooks the boxwood shrubbery and terrace-gardens. The heavy fragrance of blossoms with the drowsy damp of the river air had gone to my head like a drug.
I felt unsteady, uncertain. The studio garments I wore actually burdened my brain and clogged my steps, for I seemed to be searching, searching everywhere— for what? Well, I hardly knew. For some time my memory had played the knave with me. It was simply that nature had turned Shylock and was exacting from the prodigal even more than her rightful pound.
There were times of late when, without warning, my head would spin and seethe, and my body quiver in a frenzy. Such attacks invariably left my nerves in shreds, and made the dread of the future unspeakably terrifying. To-night I seemed both unnerved and fearful. The perfumed air of the balcony oppressed me, the shrubbery below haunted me.
Thus, in striding up and down, I felt that something extraordinary had happened. The very atmosphere in its heaviness breathed mystery. I peered over the trim lawns set with flower-beds and cone-cut bays, and back again at the dense wall of shrubbery barely distinguishable in the wan starlight.
I stared inside the reception-hall, shadowed save for the clusters of light over the mirror at the far end, and, staring, I stumbled; something crackled and shivered under my feet.
Perhaps you know the shock of stumbling when the nerves are keyed to a certain tension. Perhaps you have heard that sharp, crunching sound that tingles through your tense body like a sword-thrust, and leaves you weak and trembling!
Well, I found myself tottering in a mass of broken porcelain, and, looking down, noticed hundreds of fragments scattered about the tiled pavement. At first I was puzzled, and yet I should have known.
With no feeling other than sadness, I bent and gathered a few of the fragments in my shaking hands. They startled me with a fiendish suggestion. Even as I handled them, they flashed in my eyes