F ROM TH E L I B RARYOF 
 
 
 University of California Berkeley 
 
I '- /-* I 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM 
 
 A STOUT 
 
 BY 
 
 W. D. HOWELLS 
 
 AUTHOR OP "APRIL HOPES" "ANNIE KILBURN 
 "A HAZARD OP NEW FORTUNES" ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 
 1890 
 
Copyright. 1890, by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Elcctrotyped by David Douglas, Edinburgh. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 PART FIRST. FAULKNER. 
 
 I. 
 
 DOUGLAS FAULKNER was of a type once commoner 
 in the West than now, I fancy. In fact, many of 
 the circumstances that tended to shape such a 
 character, with the conditions that repressed and 
 the conditions that evolved it, have changed so 
 vastly that they may almost be said not to exist any 
 longer. 
 
 He was a lawyer, with a high ideal of professional 
 honour, and in his personal relations he was known 
 to be almost fantastically delicate, generous, and 
 faithful. At the same time he was a "practical" 
 politician; he adhered to his party in all its 
 measures ; he rose rapidly to be a leader in it, and 
 was an unscrupulous manager of caucuses and con- 
 ventions. For a while he was editor of the party 
 A 
 
2 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 organ in his city, and he wrote caustic articles for it 
 which were rather in the line of his political than 
 his personal morality. This employment was sup- 
 posed to be more congenial than his profession to 
 the literary taste for which he had a large repute 
 among his more unliterary acquaintance. They 
 said that Faulkner could have been an author if he 
 had chosen, and they implied that this was not 
 worth while with a man who could be something in 
 law and politics. Their belief had followed him 
 from Muskingum University, where he was graduated 
 with distinction in letters and forensics. The school 
 was not then on so grand a scale as its name, and a 
 little of the humanities might have gone n long way 
 in it ; but Faulkner was really a lover of books, and 
 a reader of them, whether he could ever have been 
 a writer of them or not ; and he kept up his habit 
 of reading after he entered active life. 
 
 It was during his editorial phase that I came from 
 the country to be a writer on the opposition news- 
 paper in his city, and something I did caught his 
 fancy : some sketch of the sort I was always trying 
 at, or some pert 'criticism, or some flippant satire of 
 his party friends. He came to see me, and asked me 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 3 
 
 to his house, for a talk, he said, about literature ; 
 and when I went I chose to find him not very modern 
 in his preferences. He wanted to talk to me about 
 Byron and Shelley, Scott and Cooper, Lamartine 
 and Schiller, Irving and Goldsmith, when I was full 
 of Tennyson and Heine, Emerson and Lowell, George 
 Eliot and HaAvthorne and Thackeray ; and he rather 
 bored me, showing me fine editions of his favourites. 
 I was surprised to learn that ho was only a few years 
 older than myself : he had filled my mind so long as 
 a politician that I had supposed him a veteran of 
 thirty, at least, and he proved to be not more than 
 twenty-six. Still, as I was only twenty-two I paid 
 him the homage of a younger man, but I remember 
 deciding that he was something of a sentimentalist. 
 He seemed anxious to account for himself in his 
 public character, so out of keeping with the other 
 lives he led ; he said he was sorry that his mother 
 (with whom he lived in her widowhood) was out of 
 town ; she was the inspiration of all his love of 
 literature, he said ; and would have been so glad to 
 see me. I was flattered, for the Faulkners were of 
 the first social importance ; they were of Virginian 
 extraction. From his library he took me into what 
 
4 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 he called his den, and introduced me to a friend of 
 his who sat smoking in a corner, and whom I saw 
 to be a tall young Episcopal clergyman when he 
 stood up. The night was very hot ; Faulkner had 
 in some claret punch, and the Rev. Mr. Nevil drank 
 with us. He did not talk much, and I perceived 
 that he was the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship 
 which was very romantic on Faulkner's side, and 
 which appeared to date back to their college days. 
 That was now a good while ago, but they seemed to 
 be in the habit of meeting often, and to have kept 
 up their friendship in all its first fervour. Mr. 
 Nevil was very handsome, with a regular face, and 
 a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, 
 still, earnest blue eyes. He looked physically and 
 spiritually wholesome; but Faulkner certainly did 
 not look wholesome in the matter of his complexion 
 at least. It was pale, with a sort of smokiness, and 
 his black, straight hair strung down in points over 
 his forehead ; his beautiful dark eyes were restlessly 
 brilliant; he stooped a little, and he was, as they 
 say in the West, loose-hung. I noticed his hands, 
 long, nervous, with fingers that trembled, as he 
 rested their tips, a little yellowed from his cigar, on 
 a book. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 5 
 
 It was a volume of De Quincey, on whom we all 
 came together in literature, and we happened to 
 talk especially of his essay on Kant, and of the 
 dreams which afflicted the philosopher's old age, and 
 which no doubt De Quincey picturesquely makes 
 the most of. Then we began to tell our own 
 dreams, the ghastlier ones ; and Faulkner said he 
 sometimes had dreams, humiliating, disgraceful, 
 loathsome, that followed him far into the next day 
 with a sense of actual occurrence. He was very 
 vivid about them, and in spite of the want of 
 modernity in his literary preferences, I began to 
 think he might really have been a writer. He said 
 that sometimes he did not see why we should not 
 attribute such dreams to the Evil One, who might 
 have easier access to a man in the helplessness of 
 sleep; but Nevil agreed with me that they were 
 more likely to come from a late supper. Faulkner 
 submitted, but he said they were a real affliction, and 
 their persistence in a man's waking thoughts might 
 almost influence his life. 
 
 When I took my leave he followed me to his gate, 
 in his bare head and slippers ; it was moonlight, and 
 he walked a long way homeward with me. We led 
 
6 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 a very simple life in our little city then, and a man 
 might go bareheaded and slipper-footed about its 
 streets at night as much as he liked. Now and then 
 we met a policeman, and Faulkner nodded, with the 
 facile "Ah, Tommy I" or "Hello, Mike ! " of a man 
 inside politics. I told him I envied him his ability 
 to mingle with the people in that way, and he said 
 it was not worth while. 
 
 " You are on the right track, and I hope you '11 
 stick to it. "We ought to have some Western 
 authors ; the West 's ripe for it. I used to have the 
 conceit to think I could have done something myself 
 in literature, if I 'd kept on after I left college." 
 
 I murmured some civilities to the effect that this 
 was what all his friends thought. 
 
 " Well, it J s too late, naw," he said, " if ever it was 
 early enough. I was foredoomed to the law ; my 
 father wouldn't hear of anything else, and I don't 
 know that I blame him. I might have made a 
 spoon, but I should certainly have spoiled a horn. 
 A man generally does what he J s fit for. Now there 's 
 Nevil Don't you like Nevil ? " 
 
 I said, " Very much," though really I had not 
 thought it very seemly for a clergyman to smoke, 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 7 
 
 and drink claret-punch : I was very severe in those 
 days. 
 
 Faulkner went on : " Nevil 's an instance, a perfect 
 case in point. If ever there was a human creature 
 born into the world to do just the work he is doing, 
 it 's Nevil. I can't tell you how much that fellow 
 has been to me, March ! " This was the second 
 time we had met; but Faulkner was already on 
 terms of comradery with me ; he was the kind of 
 man who could hold no middle course; he must 
 stand haughtily aloof, or he must take you to his 
 heart. As he spoke, he put his long arm across my 
 shoulders, and kept it there while we walked. " I 
 was inclined to be pretty wild in college, and I had 
 got to running very free when I first stumbled 
 against Jim Nevil. He was standing up as tall and 
 straight morally as he does physically, but he 
 managed to meet me on my own level without 
 seeming to stoop to it. He was ordained of God, 
 then, and his life had a message for every one ; for 
 me it seemed to have a special message, and what he 
 did for me was what he lived more than what he 
 said. Ho talked to me, of course, but it was his 
 example that saved me. You must know Nevil. 
 
8 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Yes, he's a noble fellow, and you can't have any 
 true conception of friendship till you have known 
 him. Just see that moon ! " Faulkner stopped 
 abruptly, and threw up his head. 
 
 The perfect orb seemed to swim in the perfect 
 blue. The words began to breathe themselves from 
 my lips 
 
 " ' The moon doth with delight 
 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare ' " 
 
 and he responded as if it were the strain of a litany 
 
 " ' Waters on a starry night 
 Are beautiful and fair ; ' " 
 
 and I spoke 
 
 " ' The sunshine is a glorious birth ; ' " 
 
 and he responded again 
 
 " ' But yet I know, where'er I go, 
 
 That there hath passed a glory from the earth.' " 
 
 His voice broke in the last line and faded into a 
 tremulous whisper. It was the youth in both of us, 
 smitten to ecstasy by the beauty of the scene, and 
 pouring itself out in the modulations of that divine 
 stop, as if it had been the rapture of one soul. 
 
 He took his arm from my shoulders, and turned 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 9 
 
 about without any ceremony of adieu, and walked 
 away, head down, with shuffling, slippered feet. 
 
 We met several times, very pleasantly, and with 
 increased liking. Then he took offence, as capri- 
 cious as his former fancy, at something I wrote, and 
 sent me an angry note, which I answered in kind. 
 Not long afterward I went abroad on a little money 
 I had saved up, and when I came home, I married, 
 and by an ironical chance found myself, with my 
 sesthetic tastes, my literary ambition, and my jour- 
 nalistic experience, settled in the insurance business 
 at Boston. I did not revisit the "West, but I learned 
 by letters that our dear little city out there had 
 become a formidable railroad centre ; everybody had 
 made or lost money, and Faulkner had become very 
 rich through the real estate which had long kept him 
 land-poor. One day I got a newspaper addressed 
 in his handwriting, which brought me the news of 
 his marriage. The name of the lady struck me as 
 almost factitiously pretty, and I could well imagine 
 Faulkner provisionally falling in love with her 
 because she was called Hermia Winter. The half- 
 column account of the wedding described the Rev. 
 James Nevil as " officiating " ; and something in the 
 
10 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 noisy and bragging tone of the reporter in dealing 
 with this important society event disadvantaged the 
 people concerned in my mind. I chose to regard it 
 all as cruder and louder than anything I remembered 
 of the place in old days ; but my wife said that it was 
 characteristically Western, and that probably it had 
 always been like that out there ; only I had not felt it 
 while I was in it, though, as she said, I was not of it. 
 She was a Bostonian herself, and it was useless to 
 appeal to the society journalism of her own city in 
 proof of the prevalence of that sort of vulgarity 
 everywhere. She laughed at the name Hermia, and 
 said it sounded made-up, and that she had no doubt 
 the girl's name was Hannah. I thought I had my 
 revenge afterward when a friend wrote me about the 
 marriage, which was a surprise to everybody ; for it 
 had always been supposed that Faulkner was going 
 to marry the beautiful and brilliant Miss Ludlow, 
 long, perhaps too long, the belle of the place. The 
 lady whom he had chosen was the daughter of a 
 New England family, who had lived just out of town 
 in my time and had never been in society. She was 
 a teacher in Bell's Institute, and Faulkner met her 
 there on one of his business visits as trustee. She 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 11 
 
 was a very cultivated girl, though ; and they were 
 going abroad for their wedding journey. My corre- 
 spondent had a special message from Faulkner for 
 me, delivered on his wedding night. He remem- 
 bered me among the people he would have liked to 
 have there ; he was sorry for our little quarrel, 
 and was to blame for it ; he was coming home by 
 way of Boston, and was going to look me up. 
 
 My wife said, Well, he seemed a nice fellow ; but 
 it only showed how any sort of New England girl 
 could go out there and pick up the best. For the 
 rest, she hoped they would not hurry home on my 
 account ; and if all my Western friends, with their 
 free ideas of hospitality, were going to call on me, 
 there would be no end to it. It was the jealousy of 
 her husband's past every good wife feels that spoke ; 
 but long before I met Faulkner again wo had both 
 forgotten all about him. 
 
II. 
 
 ONE day seven or eight years later, when I was 
 coming up from Lynn, where we had board for a 
 few weeks' outing in August, I fell in with Dr. 
 Wingate, the nervous specialist. We were members 
 of the same dining club, and were supposed to meet 
 every month ; we really met once or twice during 
 the winter, but then it was a great pleasure to me, 
 and I tried always to get a place next him at table. 
 I found in him, as I think one finds in most intelli- 
 gent physicians, a sympathy for human suffering 
 unclouded by sentiment, and a knowledge of human 
 nature at once vast and accurate, which fascinated 
 me far more than any forays of the imagination in 
 that difficult region. Like physicians everywhere, 
 he was less local in his feelings and interests than 
 men of other professions ; and I was able better to 
 overcome with him that sense of being a foreigner, 
 and in some sort on sufferance, which embarrassed 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 13 
 
 me (quite needlessly, I dare say) with some of my 
 commensals : lawyers, ministers, brokers, and poli- 
 ticians. I had a sort of affection for him ; I never 
 saw him, with the sunny, simple-hearted, boyish 
 smile he had, without feeling glad ; and it seemed to 
 me that he liked me, too. His kindly presence 
 must have gone a long way with his patients, 
 whose fluttering sensibilities would hang upon his 
 cheery strength as upon one of the main chances 
 of life. 
 
 We rather rushed together to shake hands, and 
 each asked how the other happened to be there at 
 that hour in the morning. I explained my presence, 
 and he said, as if it were some sort of coincidence : 
 " You don't say so ! Why, I've got a patient over 
 at Swampscott, who says he knows yon. A man 
 named Faulkner." 
 
 I repeated, " Faulkner ? " In the course of travel 
 and business I had met so many people that I for- 
 gave myself for not distinguishing them very sharply 
 by name, at once. 
 
 "He says he used to know you in your demi- 
 semi-literary days, and he rather seemed to think 
 you must be concealing a reputation for a poet, when 
 
14 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 I told him you were in the insurance business, and I 
 only knew of your literary tastes. He 'a a Western 
 man, and he met you out there." 
 
 " Oh ! " said I. " Douglas Faulkner ! " And now 
 it was my turn to say, " You don't say so ! Why of 
 course ! Is it possible ! " and I lost myself in a 
 cloud of silent reminiscences and associations, to 
 come out presently with the question, "What in the 
 world is he doing at Swampscott ? " 
 
 The doctor looked serious ; and then he looked 
 keenly at me. " Were you and he great friends ? " 
 
 " Well, we were not sworn brothers exactly. We 
 were writers on rival newspapers ; but I rather liked 
 him. Yes, there was something charming to me 
 about him; something good and sweet. I haven't 
 met him, though, for ten years." 
 
 " He seemed to bo rather fond of you. He said 
 he wished I would tell you to come and see him, the 
 next time I met you. Odd you should turn up 
 there in the station ! " By this time we were in the 
 train, on our way to Boston. 
 
 " I will," I said, and I hesitated to add, " I hope 
 there 's nothing serious the matter ? " 
 
 The doctor hesitated too. "Well, he's a pretty 
 sick man. There 's no reason I shouldn't tell you. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 15 
 
 He's badly run down; and I don't like the way 
 his heart behaves." 
 
 " Oh, I 'm sorry " 
 
 " He had just got home from Europe, and was on 
 his way to the mountains when he came to see me 
 in Boston, and I sent him to the seaside. I came 
 down last night it 's the beginning of my vacation 
 to see him, and spent the night there. He 's got 
 the Mallows place nice old place. Do you know 
 his wife 1 " 
 
 " No ; he married after I came East. What sort 
 of person is she ? " I asked. 
 
 I remembered my talk with my wife about her 
 and her name, and I felt that it was really a triumph 
 for me when the doctor said : " Well, she ; s an 
 exquisite creature. One of the most beautiful 
 women I ever saw, and one of the most interesting. 
 Of course, there's where the ache comes in. In a 
 case like that, it isn't so much that one dies as that 
 the other lives. It 's none of my business ; but she 
 seemed rather lonely. They have no acquaintance 
 among the other cottagers, and did you think of 
 taking your wife over ? Excuse me ! " 
 
 " Why, of course ! I'm so glad you suggested it. 
 Mrs. March will be most happy to go with me." 
 
III. 
 
 MRS. MARCH dissembled her joy at the prospect 
 when I opened it to her. She said she did not see 
 how she entered into the affair. Faulkner was an 
 old friend of mine ; but she had nothing to do with 
 him, and certainly nothing to do with his wife. 
 They would not like each other; it would look 
 patronising; it would complicate matters; she did 
 not see what good it would do for her to go. I 
 constantly fell back upon the doctor's suggestion. 
 In the end, she went. She professed to be governed 
 entirely by Dr. Wingate's opinion of our duty in the 
 case ; I acknowledged a good deal of curiosity as 
 well as some humanity, and I boldly proposed to 
 gratify both. But in fact I felt rather ashamed of 
 my motives when I met Faulkner, and I righted 
 myself in my own regard by instantly shifting my 
 visit to the ground of friendly civility. He seemed 
 surprised and touched to see me, and he welcomed 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 1 7 
 
 my wife with that rather decorative politeness which 
 men of Southern extraction use toward women. He 
 was not going to have any of my compassion as an 
 invalid, that was clear; and he put himself on a 
 level with me in the matter of .health at once. He 
 said it was very good of Dr. Wingate to send me so 
 soon, and I was very good to come ; he was rather 
 expecting the doctor himself in the afternoon ; he 
 had been out of kilter for two or three years ; but 
 he was getting all right now. I knew he did not 
 believe this, but I made believe not to know it, and 
 I even said, when he asked me how I was, that I 
 was so-so ; and I left him to infer that everybody 
 was out of kilter, and perhaps just in his own way. 
 
 " Well, let us go up to the house," he said, as if 
 this gave him a pleasure, " and find Mrs. Faulkner. 
 You never met my wife, March 1 Her people used 
 to live just outside the city line, on Pawpaw Creek. 
 They were of New England origin," he added to my 
 wife; "but I don't know whether you'll find her 
 very much of a Yankee. She has passed most of 
 her life in the West. She will be very glad to see 
 you ; we have no acquaintances about here. Your 
 Eastern people don't catch on to the homeless 
 B 
 
18 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 stranger quite so quickly as we do in the West. I 
 dare say they don't let go so easily, either." 
 
 We had found Faulkner at the gate of his avenue, 
 and we began to walk with him at once toward his 
 cottage, under the arches of the sea-beaten, somewhat 
 wizened elms, which all slanted landward, with a 
 writhing fling of their grey and yellow lichened 
 boughs. It was a delicious morning, and the cool 
 sunshine dripped in through the thin leaves, here 
 and there blighted at the edge and faded, and seemed 
 to lie in pools in the road. The fine air was fresh, 
 and brought from a distance apparently greater than 
 it really came the plunge of the surf against the 
 rocks, and the crash of the rollers along the beach. 
 The ground fell away in a wide stretch of neglected 
 lawn toward the water ; and the autumnal dandelions 
 lifted their stars on their tall slender stems from the 
 long grass, which was full of late summer glint and 
 sheen, and blowing with a delicate sway and tilt of 
 its blades in the breeze that tossed the elms. 
 
 " What a lovely place ! " sighed my wife. 
 
 "You haven't begun to see it," said Faulkner. 
 " We 've got twenty acres of land here, and all the 
 sea and sky there are. Mrs. Faulkner will want to 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 19 
 
 show you the whole affair. Did you walk up from the 
 station 1 ? Ill send for your baggage from the house." 
 
 " That won't be necessary ; I have it on my 
 arm," said my wife, tind she put her little shopping 
 bag in evidence with a gay twirl. 
 
 " Why, but you 're going to stay all night 1 " 
 
 " Oh no, indeed ! What would become of our 
 children 1 " 
 
 " We '11 send to Lynn for them." 
 
 " Thank you ; it couldn't be managed. I won't 
 try to convince you, Mr. Faulkner, but I'm sure 
 your wife will be reasonable," she said, to forestall 
 the protests which she saw hovering in his eyes. 
 
 I noticed that his eyes, once so beautiful, had a 
 dull and suffering look, and the smokiness of his 
 complexion had a kind of livid stain in it. His 
 hair straggled from under his soft felt hat with the 
 unkempt effect I remembered, and his dress had a 
 sort of characteristic slovenliness. He carried a 
 stick, and his expressive hands seemed longer and 
 languider, as if relaxed from a nervous tension 
 borne beyond the strength. 
 
 "Well, I'm sorry," said Faulkner. "But you're 
 booked for the day, anyway." 
 
20 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 My wife apparently did not think it worth while 
 to dispute this ; or perhaps she was waiting to have 
 it out with Mrs. Faulkner. He put up his arm 
 across my shoulders, and gave me a little pull toward 
 him. " It 's mighty pleasant to see you again, old 
 fellow ! I can't tell you how pleasant." 
 
 I was not to be outdone in civilities, and my 
 cordiality in reply retrospectively established our 
 former acquaintance on a ground of intimacy which 
 it had never really occupied. My wife knew this 
 and gave me a look of surprise, which I could see 
 hardening into the resolution not to betray herself, at 
 least, into insincerities. 
 
 "You'll find another old acquaintance of yours 
 here," Faulkner went on. " You remember Nevil 1 " 
 
 " Your clerical friend 1 Yes, indeed ! Is he here ?" 
 I put as much factitious rapture into my tone as it 
 would hold. 
 
 "Yes; we were in Europe together, and he's 
 spending a month with us here." Faulkner spoke 
 gloomily, almost sullenly ; he added brightly, " You 
 know I can't get along without Jim. He was in 
 Europe with us, too, a good deal of the time. Yes, 
 we 've always been great friends." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 21 
 
 " You remember I told you about Mr. Nevil, my 
 dear," I explained to my wife. 
 
 " Oh, yes," she said non-committally. 
 
 Faulkner slipped his hand from my shoulder into 
 my arm, and gently stayed my pace a little. I 
 perceived that he was leaning on me ; but I made 
 a feint of our being merely affectionate, and slowed 
 my step as unconsciously as I could. He looked up 
 under the downward slanted brim of his hat. "I 
 expected them before this. Nevil went up to the 
 house for my wife, and then we were going down on 
 the rocks." 
 
 He stopped short, and rested heavily against me. 
 I glanced round at his face : it was a lurid red, and, 
 as it were, suffused with pain : his eyes seemed to 
 stand full of tears ; his lips were purple, and they 
 quivered. 
 
 It was an odious moment : we could not speak or 
 stir ; we suffered too, and were cruelly embarrassed, 
 for we felt that we must not explicitly recognise his 
 seizure. In front of us I saw a gentleman and lady 
 who seemed to be under something of our constraint. 
 They were coming as swiftly as possible, without 
 seeming to hurry, and they must have understood 
 
22 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 the situation, though they could not see his features. 
 Before they reached us, Faulkner's face relaxed, and 
 began to recover its natural colour. He stirred, and 
 I felt him urging me softly forward. By the time 
 we encountered the others, he was able to say, in 
 very much his usual tone, "My dear, this is Mrs. 
 March, and my old friend March, that I Ve told you 
 about. Nevil, you remember March ? Let me 
 present you to Mrs. March." 
 
 My astonishment that he could accomplish these 
 introductions was lost in the interest that Mrs. 
 Faulkner at once inspired in my wife, as I could see, 
 equally with myself. She must then have been 
 about thirty, and she had lost her girlish slenderness 
 without having lost her girlish grace. Her figure, 
 tall much above the wont of women, had a mature 
 stateliness, while fitful gleams of her first youth bright- 
 ened her face, her voice, her manner. There could be 
 no doubt about her refinement, and none about her 
 beauty ; the one was as evident as the other. The 
 beauty was of a usual American type ; the refinement 
 was from her eyes, which were angelic ; deep and 
 faithful and touching. I am sure this was the first 
 impression of my wife as well as myself. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 23 
 
 I shook hands with Nevil, whom I found looking 
 not so much older as the past ten years should have 
 made him. His dark golden hair had retreated a 
 little on his forehead, and there were some faint, 
 faint lines down his cheeks and his shaven lips. I 
 saw the look of anxiety he cast furtively at Faulkner ; 
 but for that he seemed as young and high-hearted 
 as when we first met. I searched his eyes for the 
 clear goodness which once dwelt in them, and found 
 it, a little saddened, a little sobered, a little more 
 saintly, but all there, still. I cannot tell how my 
 heart went out to him with a tenderness which 
 nothing in his behaviour toward me had ever invited. 
 On the few occasions when we met, he had always 
 loyally left me to Faulkner, who made all the 
 advances and offered all the caresses, without win- 
 ning any such return of affection from me as I now 
 involuntarily felt for Nevil. Of course I looked at 
 my wife to see what she thought of him. I saw that 
 something in her being a woman, which drew her to 
 Mrs. Faulkner, left her indifferent to Nevil. 
 
IV. 
 
 "HERMIA," said Faulkner, sounding the canine 
 letter in her name with a Western strength that was 
 full of the charm of old associations for me, " these 
 people have got some children at Lynn, and they 
 can't stay here overnight because they didn't bring 
 them. I'm going to send over for them." 
 
 "Oh, I should like to See your children," she 
 answered to my wife cordially, yet submissively, as 
 the way of one wise woman is with another concern- 
 ing her children. 
 
 Mrs. March explained how it was in no wise 
 possible to have the children sent for ; and how we 
 had only come for a short call. I perceived that all 
 Mrs. Faulkner's politeness could not keep her mind 
 on what my wife was saying : that she was scanning 
 her husband's face with devoted intensity. The 
 same absence showed itself in Nevil's manner. Of 
 course they were both terribly anxious; I could 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 25 
 
 understand that from what I had already seen of 
 Faulkner's case ; and in his interest they were both 
 trying to hide their anxiety. Of course, too, he 
 knew it on Ins part, and he tried to ignore their 
 efforts at concealment. We were all playing at the 
 futile and heart-breaking comedy which humanity 
 obliges us to keep up with a dying man, and in 
 which he must bear his part with the rest. We 
 began to be even gay. Faulkner insisted again that 
 we were good for the whole day ; his wife joined 
 him ; he appealed to Nevil to put it to Mrs. March 
 as a duty (that would fetch any New England 
 woman, he said), and we consented to stay over 
 lunch, in a burlesque of being kept prisoners. While 
 this went on, I could not help noticing the quality 
 of the look which Faulkner turned upon his wife and 
 Nevil when he spoke to either : a sort of deadliness 
 passing into a piteous appeal. It was very curious. 
 
 He asked if we should go down on the rocks, or 
 up to the house, and we decided that we had better 
 go to the house, and do the rocks after lunch : the 
 tide was coming in, and the surf would be better 
 and better. 
 
 " All right," he said, and we let Mr. Nevil lead the 
 
26 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 way with the ladies, while we came at a little dis- 
 tance behind. Faulkner began at once to praise 
 Nevil, for his goodness in staying on with him so 
 long after he had given up to him the whole past 
 year in Europe. I said the proper things in appre- 
 ciation, and Faulkner went on to say that Nevil had 
 the richest and the poorest parish in our old home 
 now, the most millionaires and the most paupers; 
 and he had made St. Luke's a refuge and a sanctuary 
 for them all. He said he did not suppose a man 
 had ever been so fortunate as he was in his friend- 
 ship with Nevil. At first his wife had been jealous 
 of it, but now she had got used to it ; and though he 
 did not suppose she would ever quite forgive Nevil 
 for having been his friend before her time, she 
 tolerated him. I said I understood how that sort of 
 thing was ; and he added that there was also the 
 religious difference : Mrs. Faulkner's people were 
 Unitarians, and she was strenuous in their faith, 
 where he never allowed her to be molested. We got 
 to talking about the old times in the West, and the 
 people whom we had known in common, and how 
 the city had grown, and how I would hardly know 
 where I was if I were dropped down in it. But he 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 27 
 
 kept returning to Nevil and to his wife, and I became 
 rather tired of them. 
 
 The cottage, when we reached it, afforded a relief 
 by its extremely remarkable prettiness. Though it 
 was so near the sea, it was almost hidden in trees, 
 and as Faulkner said, if you did not purposely look 
 out to the water, you could easily imagine yourself 
 in the depths of the country. As we sat on the 
 veranda that shaded three sides of the house, he 
 named the different points on the coast, with the 
 curious accuracy which some people like to achieve 
 in particulars wholly unimportant to other people. 
 I suppose he had amused the sad leisure of his sick- 
 ness in verifying the geography, and I tried to be in- 
 terested in it, though I was so much more interested 
 in him. He sat deeply sunken in a low Japanese 
 arm-chair of rushes, with his long lean legs one 
 crossed on the other, and fondling the crook of his 
 stick with his thin right hand, while he looked out 
 to seaward under the brim of his hat pulled down to 
 his eyes. Nevil went directly to his room when we 
 reached the cottage, and after a little while Mrs. 
 Faulkner took my wife away to show her the house, 
 which was vast and extravagantly furnished for a 
 
28 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 summer cottage. " It had gone unlet until very late 
 in the season," Faulkner said, " and you 've no idea 
 how cheap we got it. I suppose it 's a little out of 
 society, off here on this point; you see it 's quite alone; 
 but as we 're out of society, too, it just suits us." 
 
 He looked after his wife as she left the veranda 
 with Mrs. March, and I fancied in his glance at her 
 buoyant, strenuous grace and her beauty of perfect 
 health, something of the despair with which a sick 
 man must feel the whole world slipping from his 
 hold, too weak to close upon the most precious 
 possession, and keep it for his helplessness even 
 while he stays. 
 
 The ladies were gone a good while, and he rambled 
 on incessantly as if to keep me from thinking about 
 his condition; or at least I fancied this because I 
 could not help thinking of it. Just as they returned, 
 he was asking me, "Do you remember our talking 
 
 that night about Kant's dreams, and " He 
 
 stopped, and called out to my wife, " Well, don't you 
 think we are in luck ? " 
 
 " Luck doesn't express it, Mr. Faulkner. You 're 
 in clover, knee-deep. I didn't imagine there was 
 such a place, anywhere." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 29 
 
 "After lunch we must show you our old garden, 
 as well as the rocks," said Faulkner. "At present 
 I don't see how we could do better than stay where 
 we are." 
 
 I thought he was going to recur to the subject he 
 had dropped at sight of the returning ladies, but he 
 did not. He asked my wife if Mrs. Faulkner had 
 shown her the copy they had made of Murillo's 
 Madonna, and he talked about its qualities with an 
 authoritative ignorance of art which I should have 
 found amusing in different circumstances. He had 
 made a complete collection of all the engravings of 
 this Madonna, and of all the sentimental Madonnas 
 of the Parmesan school. He considered them very 
 spiritual, and said he would show them to us, some- 
 time ; he always carried them about with him ; but 
 he wanted to keep something to tempt us back 
 another day. He asked her if she cared for rare 
 editions, and said he wished he had his large paper 
 copies with him. He told her I would remember 
 them, and I pretended that I did. I do not think 
 Faulkner had read much since I saw him. He 
 talked about Bulwer and Dickens, and Cherbuliez 
 and Octave Feuillet as if they were modern. But 
 
30 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 nobody came up to Victor Hugo. Of course we had 
 both read Les Miserables 1 Mrs. Faulkner, he said, 
 was crazy about a Russian fellow : Tourgue"nief. 
 Had we read him, and could we make anything out 
 of him 1 Faulkner could not, for his part. Were 
 we ever going to have any great poets again 1 Byron 
 was the last that you could really call great. 
 
 His wife listened in a watchful abeyance to see if 
 he needed anything, or felt worse, or was getting 
 tired. From time to time he sent her for some book, 
 or print, or curio that he mentioned, and whenever 
 she came back, he gave her first that deadly look. 
 Afterward, I fancied that he despatched her on these 
 errands to make experiment of how the sight of her 
 would affect him. at each return. 
 
 The sea stretched a vast shimmer of thin greyish 
 blue under the perfect sky; and the ships moved 
 half sunk on its rim, or seemed buoyantly lifting 
 from it for flight in the nearer distance. The 
 colours were those of an aquarelle, washes of this 
 tint and that, bodyless and impalpable, and they 
 were attenuated to the last thinness in the 
 long yellow curve of beach, and the break of the 
 shallow rollers upon it. Faulkner said they never 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 31 
 
 got tired of looking; there was one effect on the 
 wide wet beach, which he wished we could see, 
 when people were riding toward you, and seemed 
 to be walking on some kind of extraordinary 
 stilts. 
 
 Mr. Nevil came down, and then Mrs. Faulkner 
 said it must be near lunch-time, and asked my wife 
 and me if we would not like to go to our room 
 first. 
 
V. 
 
 As soon as the door closed upon us, my wife broke 
 out : " Welly my dear ! it 's just as I imagined. AVhat 
 a tiresome creature ! And how ignorant and arro- 
 gant 1 Is that what you call a cultivated person in 
 the West ?" 
 
 "Well, I don't think I shall quite hold myself 
 responsible for Faulkner; I'll own he hasn't im- 
 proved since I saw him last. But I always told you 
 he was a sentimentalist." 
 
 " Sentimentalist ! He 's one sop of sentiment ; and 
 as conventional ! Second-rate and second-hand ! 
 Why, my dear \ Could you ever have thought there 
 was anything to that man 1 " 
 
 " Well, certainly more than I do at present. But 
 I don't recollect that I ever boasted him Apollo and 
 the nine Muses all boiled down into one." 
 
 She did not relent. " Why, compared with him, 
 that Mr. Nevil is a burning and a shining light." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 33 
 
 " Nevil has certainly gathered brilliancy somehow," 
 I admitted. 
 
 " It 's quite like such a man as Faulkner to want 
 a three-cornered household. I think the man who 
 can't give up his intimate friends after he 's married, 
 is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to 
 them ; it 's a tacit reflection on his wife's heart and 
 mind." 
 
 " Yes, I think you 're quite right there," I said, 
 waiting for her to put the restorative touches to the 
 bang which the sea-breeze had made a little too limp 
 for social purposes ; and we went over together the 
 list of households we knew in which the husband 
 supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We 
 agreed that it was the innocence of our life that 
 made it so common, but we said all the same that it 
 was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept 
 the husband and wife apart, and kept them from the 
 absolutely free exchange of tendernesses at any and 
 every moment, and forbade them the equally whole- 
 some immediate expression of resentments, or else 
 gave their quarrels a witness whom they could not 
 look at without remembering that they had quarrelled 
 in his presence. We made allowance for the differ- 
 c 
 
34 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 ence in the case of Nevil and the Faulkners ; there 
 was now at least a real reason for his being with 
 them ; they would have been singularly lonely and 
 helpless without him. 
 
 " They have no children ! " said my wife. " That 
 says it all. They are really not a family. Oh, clear ! 
 I hope it isn't wicked for us to be so happy in our 
 children, Basil." 
 
 " It 's a sin that I think I can brazen out at the 
 Day of Judgment," I answered. "What does she 
 say when you have her alone with another woman r l " 
 
 " Well, there you 've hit upon the true test, my 
 dear. If a person 's genuine, and not a poseuse, she 's 
 more interesting when you have her alone with 
 another woman, than when you have her with a lot 
 of men. And Mrs. Faulkner stands the test. Yes, 
 she J s a great creature." 
 
 " Why, what did she say 1 " 
 
 "Say? Nothing! You don't have to say any- 
 thing. You merely have to le" 
 
 " Oh ! That seems rather simple." 
 
 "Stuff! You know what I mean. You're the 
 true blue, if you don't begin to fade or change your 
 tone, in the least. If you remain just what you 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 35 
 
 were, and are not anxious to get away. If you have 
 repose, and are unselfish enough to be truly polite. 
 If you make the other woman that you 're alone with 
 feel that she 's just as well worth while as a man. 
 And that can't be done by saying. Now do you 
 understand ? " 
 
 " Yes ; and it appears difficult." 
 
 " Difficult 1 It 's next to impossible ! " 
 
 " And it can all be conveyed by manner ? ;; 
 
 " Of course we talked " 
 
 " She must have flattered you enormously." 
 
 " She praised you \ " 
 
 " Oh ! " I said in admiration of the way my point 
 was turned against me. But I was not satisfied 
 with my wife's judgment of Faulkner. I could 
 not say it was unjust to the facts before her, but 
 I felt that something was left out of the account : 
 something that she as a woman and an Easterner 
 could not take into the account. We men and 
 we Westerners have a civilisation of our own. 
 
 She went on to say, " Of course I couldn't be with 
 her for quarter of an hour, and especially after I had 
 seen what he was, without understanding her mar 
 riage. She 's a great deal younger than he is ; and 
 
36 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 she was earning her own living, poor thing, and 
 perhaps supporting her family " 
 
 " Oh, oh ! What jumps ! " 
 
 " At any rate, she was poor, and they were poor; 
 and she was dazzled by his offer, and might easily 
 have supposed herself in love with him. Her people 
 would be flattered too, if they were not quite up to 
 her, and he was a great swell among you, out there, 
 and rich, and all that. Of course she simply had to 
 marry him. And then she outgrew him. With 
 her taste and her sense, it could only be a question 
 of time. I know she was writhing inwardly through 
 all his pretentious, ignorant talk about art and 
 literature ; but with her ideal of duty, she would 
 rather die than let anybody see that she didn't think 
 him the greatest and wisest of human creatures. 
 They have no children ; and that might be fatal to 
 any woman that was less noble and heroic than she 
 is. But she 's simply made him her child since his 
 sickness, and devoted herself to him, and that 's been 
 their salvation. She won't let herself see any fault 
 in him, or anything offensive or conceited or petty." 
 
 " Did she tell you all this ? " 
 
 " What an idea ! I knew it from the way she 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 37 
 
 kept lugging him in, and relating everything to 
 him. You could see she was simply determined to 
 do it." 
 
 " Oh then you Ve romanced all this about her ! 
 Suppose I begin, now, and romance poor old Faulk- 
 ner?" 
 
 " You 're welcome ; if you can make anything out 
 of him." 
 
 " Well, of course, I 'm at a disadvantage. In the 
 first place, he isn't quite so pretty as his wife " 
 
 "No, he isn't I" 
 
 " And his name isn't Hermia, or Hannah." 
 
 " Oh, it is Hermia ! " my wife interrupted. " I 'm 
 satisfied of that. But what geese her parents must 
 have been to call her so ! " 
 
 I ignored the interpolation. " And he hasn't got a 
 regular two-horse carriage of a walk, nor immortal eyes 
 with starlike sorrows in them; he seems plainer and 
 limper than ever, poor old fellow. Ah, my dear, our mis- 
 eries don't embellish our persons very much, whatever 
 they do for our souls ; and Faulkner's good looks " 
 
 My wife had quite finished repairing her dis- 
 ordered bang, and we had abandoned ourselves 
 entirely to controversy. A knock at the door 
 
38 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 startled us, and it was Mrs. Faulkner's voice which 
 said outside, " Lunch is ready/' 
 
 My wife seized my wrist melodramatically, and 
 almost at the moment of answering, in a sweet, high 
 society tone, "Yes, yes, thank you! We're quite 
 ready too ! " she hissed in my ear, " Basil ! Do you 
 suppose she heard you ? " 
 
 " If she did," I said, " she must have thought I 
 was praising Faulkner's beauty." 
 
VI. 
 
 THE lunch was a proof of Mrs. Faulkner's native 
 skill as a housekeeper, in all its appointments, and 
 of her experience and observation of certain details 
 of touch and flavour, acclimated and naturalised to 
 the American kitchen from the cuisines of Southern 
 Europe. It meant money, but not money alone ; it 
 meant sympathy and appreciation and the artistic 
 sense. I could see that my wife ate every morsel 
 with triumph over me; I could feel that without 
 looking at her; and she rendered merit to Mrs. 
 Faulkner for it all, as much as if she had cooked it, 
 created it. In fact I knew that my wife had fallen 
 in love with her ; and when you have fallen in love 
 with a married woman you must of course hate her 
 husband, especially if you are another woman. 
 
 I thought this reflection rather neat, and I wished 
 that I could have a chance to put it to my wife ; but 
 none offered till it was for ever too late ; none offered 
 
40 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 at all, in effect. After lunch we went that walk they 
 had planned, and this time Faulkner took the two 
 ladies in charge, or rather he fell to them, that he 
 might tacitly be under his wife's care. I heard him, 
 as I lagged behind with Nevil, devoting himself to 
 Mrs. March with his decorative politeness, and I 
 longed in vain to beg the poor man to spare himself. 
 
 Nevil and I spoke irrelevancies till we had 
 dropped back out of ear-shot. Then he asked, 
 " How do you find Faulkner ? " and looked at me. 
 
 There was no reason why I should not be honest. 
 "Well, I confess he gave me a great shock." 
 
 " When he had that seizure 1 " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " But generally speaking ? " 
 
 " Generally speaking he seems to me a very sick 
 man." 
 
 " You see him at his best," said Nevil ; and he 
 fetched a deep sigh. " This is an exceptionally good 
 day with him." 
 
 " Does he suffer often in that way ? " 
 
 " Yes ; rather often." 
 
 " And is he in danger at such times ? " 
 
 "The greatest. The chance is that he will not 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 41 
 
 live through such a seizure; he may die at any 
 moment without the seizure. Any little excitement 
 may bring on the paroxysm. I suppose it was seeing 
 you unexpectedly." 
 
 " Of course, I didn't know we should meet him." 
 
 "Oh, no one was to blame," said Nevil. "The 
 inevitable can't be avoided. Somehow it must 
 come." 
 
 We were silent. Then I said, " He seemed to be 
 in great agony/' 
 
 "I suppose we can't imagine such agony." 
 
 " And is there no hope for him 1 " 
 
 " I understand, none at all." 
 
 " And he must go on suffering that way till 
 
 It's horrible! He'd better be dead!" I said, 
 remembering the atrocity of the anguish which 
 Faulkner's face had betrayed : the livid lips, the* 
 suffused eyes, the dumb ache visible in every fibre 
 of his dull, copper-tinted visage. 
 
 " Ah ! " said Nevil, with another long, quivering 
 fligh. "We mustn't allow ourselves to say such 
 things, or even to think them. The appeal to death 
 from the most intolerable pain, it 's going from the 
 known to the unknown. Death is in the hands of 
 
42 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 God, as life is; he giveth and he taketh away. 
 Blessed be the name of the Lord ! Blessed, blessed ! " 
 He dropped his head, and lifted it suddenly. " We 
 must say that all the more when we see such hope- 
 less, senseless torment as Faulkner's. I've often 
 tried to think what Christ meant by that cry of his 
 on the cross, * My God, why hast thou forsaken me V 
 It couldn't have been that he doubted his Father ; 
 that 's monstrous. But perhaps in the exquisite tor- 
 ture that he suffered, his weak, bewildered human 
 nature forgot, lost for the dire moment, the reason 
 of pain." 
 
 " And is there any reason for pain 1 " I asked 
 sceptically. " Or any except that it frays away the 
 tissues whose tatters are to let the spirit through ? " 
 
 " I used not to think so, and I used to groan in 
 despair when I could see no other reason for it. 
 What can we say about the pain that does not end 
 in death ? Is it wasted, suffered to no end ? Shall 
 mortal man be more just than God? Shall man 
 work wisely, usefully, definitely, and God work 
 stupidly, idly, purposelessly ? It 's impossible ! Our 
 whole being denies it ; whatever we see or hear, of 
 waste or aimlessness in the universe, which seems to 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 43 
 
 affirm it, we know to be an illusion : our very nature 
 protests it so. But I could not reason to the reason, 
 and I owe my release to the suggestion of a friend 
 whose experience of suffering had schooled him to 
 clearer and deeper insight than mine. He had per- 
 ceived, or it had been given him to feel, that no pang 
 we suffer in soul or sense, is lost or wasted, but is 
 suffered to the good of some one, or of all. How, 
 we shall some time know ; and why. For the pre- 
 sent the assurance that it is so, is enough for me, and 
 it enables me to be patient with the suffering of a 
 man who is more to me than any brother could be. 
 Sometimes it seems to me the clew to the whole 
 labyrinthine mystery of life and death, of Being and 
 Not-being." 
 
 "It's a great thought," I said. "It's immensely 
 comforting. What does Faulkner think of it ? 
 Have you ever suggested it to him ] " 
 
 I could not tell whether he fancied an edge of 
 irony in my question ; but it seemed as if he spirit- 
 ually withdrew from me a little way, and then dis- 
 ciplined himself and returned. "No," he said 
 gently. " Faulkner rejects everything. As he says, 
 he is going it blind. He says it will soon be over 
 
44 
 
 with him, and then if he sleeps, it will be well with 
 him, and if he wakes it can't be worse with him than 
 it is now ; and so he won't worry about the why or 
 wherefore of anything since he can't help it." 
 
 " That doesn't seem a bad kind of philosophy," I 
 mused aloud. 
 
 " No. Whatever we call such a frame of mind, 
 it 's practically trust in God. And I don't judge 
 Faulkner, if his resignation is sometimes rather con- 
 temptuous in its expression. I wish it were other- 
 wise ; but I doubt if he 's always quite master of 
 himself." 
 
 We Avalked slowly on. Faulkner, I knew, was 
 aware of his condition, and I thought his courage 
 splendid, in view of it. I wondered if his wife knew 
 it as fully as he; probably she did; and when I 
 considered this, I appeared to myself the most 
 trivial of human beings, though I am not so sure 
 now that I was. We are all what the absence, 
 not the presence, of death has made us. 
 
 I found myself at a standstill, and I perceived 
 that Nevil had halted me. "Did it strike you 
 have you seen anything strange peculiar in Faulk- 
 ner's manner ? " 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 45 
 
 " No," I returned. "That is, how do you mean? " 
 
 " I 've sometimes fancied lately I've been afraid 
 that his mind was giving way under the stress of 
 his suffering. It 's something that often happens 
 it 's something that Dr. Wingate has apprehended." 
 
 " Good heavens ! That would be too much. I 
 saw no sign of it. He recurred once, just before 
 lunch, to that night when we first met at his house, 
 and had that talk about Kant's dreams, and De 
 Quincey. I thought he was going to say something ; 
 but just then the ladies came back to us and he 
 began to talk to them." 
 
 Nevil looked at me fixedly. " Very likely I 'm 
 mistaken. Perhaps my own mind isn't standing it 
 very well ! But the fear of that additional horror, I 
 assure you that it makes my heart stop when I think 
 of it. I ought to go away. I ought to be at home ; 
 I Ve spent the past year in Europe with the Faulk- 
 ners, as as their guest and I have no right to a 
 vacation this summer. There are duties, interests, 
 claims upon me, that I 'm neglecting in my proper 
 work ; and yet I can't tear myself away from him 
 from them." 
 
 We stood facing each other, and Nevil was speak- 
 
46 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 ing with the perturbation of an anxiety still sup- 
 pressed, but now finding vent for the first time, and 
 carrying us deep into an intimacy unwarranted by 
 the casual character of our acquaintance. 
 
 I heard my wife's voice calling, " Come, come ! " 
 and I looked up to see both of the ladies waving 
 their handkerchiefs from an open gate where they 
 stood, and beckoning us on. 
 
 " Oh yes," said Nevil. " That 's the old garden." 
 
VII. 
 
 SOME former proprietor had built a paling of 
 slender strips of wood ten or twelve feet high, and 
 set so close together as almost to touch one another ; 
 and in this shelter from the salt gales had planted a 
 garden on the southward, seaward slope, which must 
 once have nourished in delicious luxuriance. The 
 paling, weather-beaten a silvery grey, and blotched 
 with lichens, sagged and swayed all out of plumb, 
 with here and there a belvedere trembling upon rot- 
 ting posts, and reached by broken steps, for the out- 
 look over a tumult of vast rocks to the illimitable 
 welter of the sea. Within the garden close there 
 were old greenhouses and graperies, their roofs 
 sunken in and their glass shattered, where every 
 spring the tall weeds sprang up to the light, and 
 withered in midsummer for want of moisture, and 
 the Black Hamburgs and Sweetwaters set in large 
 clusters whose berries mildewed and burst, and 
 
48 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 mouldered away in never-riping decay. Broken 
 flower-pots strewed the ground about them, and 
 filled the tangles of the grass ; but nature took up 
 the word from art, and continued the old garden in 
 her wilding fashion to an effect of disordered love- 
 liness that was full of poetry sad to heart-break. 
 Neglected rose-bushes straggled and fell in the high 
 grass, their leaves tattered and skeletoned by slugs 
 and blight; but here and there they still lifted a 
 belated flower. The terraced garden beds were 
 dense with witch-grass, through which the black- 
 berry vines trailed their leaves, already on fire with 
 autumn ; young sumach-trees and Balm of Gilead 
 scrub had sprung up in the paths, and about among 
 the abandon and oblivion of former symmetry, stiff 
 borders of box gave out their pungent odour in the 
 sun that shone through clumps of tiger-lilies. The 
 pear-trees in their places had been untouched by the 
 pruning-knife for many a year, but they bore on 
 their knotty and distorted scions, swollen to black 
 lumps, crops of gnarled and misshapen fruit that 
 bowed their branches to the ground ; some peach- 
 trees held a few leprous peaches, pale, and spotted 
 with the gum that exuded from their limbs and 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 49 
 
 trunks; over staggering trellises the grape-vines 
 clung, and dangled imperfect bunches of Isabellas 
 and Concords. 
 
 " Well, how do you like it ? " asked Faulkner, with 
 a sort of pride in our sensation, as if he had invented 
 the place. 
 
 " Perfect ! Perfect ! " cried my wife absorbing all 
 its sentiment in a long, in-drawn sigh. "Nothing 
 could possibly be better. You can't believe you 're 
 in America here ! " 
 
 He smiled in sympathy, and said, " No, for all 
 practical purposes this is as old as Caesar. That 'a 
 what I used to feel over there. You can hold only 
 just so much antiquity. The ruin of twenty years, 
 if it 's complete in its way, can fill you as full as the 
 ruin of a thousand." 
 
 "Yes, that's true," my wife answered, and I saw 
 her eyes begin to light up with liking for a man who 
 could express her feeling so well. 
 
 "But to enjoy perfectly a melancholy, a desola- 
 tion, a crazy charm, a dead and dying beauty like 
 this," he went on, " one ought to be very young and 
 prosperous and happy. Then it would exhale all the 
 sweetness of its melancholy, and distil into one's cup 
 D 
 
50 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 the drop of pathos that gives pleasure its keenest 
 thrill." His voice broke with a feeling that forbade 
 me to censure his words for magniloquence. 
 
 It seemed to make his wife uneasy ; perhaps from 
 long, close observation of him she knew how often 
 the spiritual throe runs into the physical pang, and 
 feared for the effect of his mood upon him. 
 
 " Shall we go on and show them the rocks from 
 the Point, or from one of the belvederes here ? " she 
 asked. 
 
 " I don't care," he said wearily ; and again I saw 
 that deadliness in the look he gave her. Then he 
 seemed to recollect himself, and added politely, "I 'm 
 afraid of those belvederes; you can't tell what 
 moment they 're going to give way. Better go out 
 to the Point." 
 
 "Do you think," she entreated, "you had better 
 walk so far 1 " 
 
 "Well, perhaps March will stay here with me 
 a while, and we can follow you later. I 'm all right ; 
 only a little tired." 
 
 I acquiesced, of course, and the ladies, after the 
 usual nutter of civilities, started on. Nevil lingered 
 to ask, " Doug, don't you think I 'd better go back 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 51 
 
 and leave word for the doctor where he '11 find you, if 
 lie happens to come before we return to the house ] " 
 
 "Oh, I've arranged all that," said Faulkner, with 
 a kind of dryness, as it seemed, though it might have 
 been merely a sick man's impatience ; and he did not 
 look up after Nevil as he turned away. 
 
 We stood silent a moment, after he left us, and I 
 said, to break the constraint, " How much all this 
 seems like those been-there-before seizures which we 
 used to make so much of when we were young. 
 This garden, this sky, the sea out there, the very feel 
 of the air, are as familiar to me as any most intimate 
 experience of my life, and yet I know it's all as 
 unreal, as unsubstantial historically, as the shadow 
 of a dream." 
 
 " How horribly," said Faulkner, as if he had not 
 heard me, "those old flower-beds look like graves. 
 I was going to sit down on one of them, but I can't 
 do it." 
 
 " It would have been pretty damp, anyway ; 
 wouldn't it ? " I suggested. 
 
 " Perhaps. We can sit in that idiotic arbour, I 
 suppose." 
 
 He nodded at the frail structure on the terrace 
 
52 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 below where we stood : two sides of trellis meeting 
 in an arch, and canted over like the belvederes ; a 
 dead grape-vine hung upon it. I stepped down, and 
 made sure of the benches which faced each other 
 under the arch. "Yes; they're all eight. Nothing 
 could be better," and Faulkner followed me, and 
 took one of them. After some experiment of its 
 strength, he leaned back in the corner of the arbour, 
 and put his legs up along the seat. 
 
 The hoarse plunge and wash of the surf on the 
 rocks below the garden filled the air like the texture 
 of a denser silence ; around us the crickets and grass- 
 hoppers blent their monotonies with it, 
 
 " Why do you call the shadow of a dream unsub- 
 stantial 1 " ho demanded. 
 
 " Well, I don't know," I said. " I don't suppose 
 I meant to say that it was more unsubstantial than 
 other shadows." 
 
 " No. Of course." He dropped his eyelids, and 
 went on . talking with them closed ; the effect was 
 curious; perhaps he found he could keep himself 
 calmer in that way. " I began to speak to you a 
 little while ago of the talk we had that night at my 
 house about old Kant's nightmares." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 53 
 
 " Oh yes ; poor old fellow ! It was awful, his 
 being afraid to go to sleep because he was sure to 
 have them. I don't know but that 's a touch worse 
 than not being able to go to sleep at all. Just 
 imagine : as soon as you drop off to refieshing 
 slumber, as you would otherwise expect, you find 
 you've dropped as it were into hell." 
 
 "Yes; that's it," said Faulkner. "I wonder if 
 it was the same thing over and over." 
 
 "I don't remember what De Quincey says about 
 that ; and I don't know whether that would be worse 
 or not. Perhaps, torment for torment, infernal 
 monotony would be more infernal than infernal 
 variety. But there couldn't be much choice." 
 
 Faulkner did not speak at once. Then he asked, 
 " Did you ever have a recurrent dream 1 " 
 
 " A dream that repeated itself several times the 
 same night ] Yes, I Ve waked from a dream or 
 seemed to wake and then fallen asleep and dreamed 
 it again; and then waked and slept and dreamed 
 it a third time. I suppose nearly every one has had 
 that experience." 
 
 " I don't mean that kind of dream," said 
 Faulkner, " I mean a dream that recurs regularly, 
 
54 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 once a week or so, with little or no change in its 
 incidents." 
 
 " No ; I never had that kind of dream ; I don't 
 know that I ever heard of such a dream. I re- 
 member your speaking that night about shameful 
 dreams, that projected a sense of dishonour over 
 half the next day. I 've had that kind. They 're a 
 great nuisance. And then, if I 've made free, as one '& 
 appallingly apt to do in such dreams, with persons 
 of my acquaintance, it's extremely embarrassing to 
 meet them." Faulkner smiled, and I asked, "Do 
 you find that your dream habit has changed since 
 you were younger ? " 
 
 " Yes ; the dreams are more vivid ; but usually I 
 don't remember them so distinctly. I suppose it 's 
 like life : we, experience things with a sharper and 
 fuller consciousness than we once did, but they leave 
 less impression." 
 
 " Yes, yes ! " I assented. " I wonder why." 
 
 " Oh, I suppose because the fact is inscribed upon 
 a surface that 's already occupied. We 're all old 
 palimpsests by the time we reach forty. In youth 
 we present a tabula rasa to experience." 
 
 " Then I should think we wouldn't receive im- 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 55 
 
 pressions with that sharper and fuller consciousness," 
 I suggested. "And yet I know we do." 
 
 " I don't understand it either," said Faulkner. 
 
 "There's one thing I've noticed of late years in 
 my own dream habit, which I don't remember in the 
 past. I go to sleep sometimes almost always in my 
 afternoon naps with a perfectly wide-awake know- 
 ledge that I 'm doing so ; and I 'm able to pass the 
 bounds with my eyes open, as it were. I can say to 
 myself as I drowse off, 'This is a dream thought, 
 if I find something grotesque floating through my 
 mind, and then, 'This is a waking thought,' when 
 there is something logical and matter-of-fact. I come 
 and go, that way, half a dozen times before I lose 
 myself." 
 
 "That is very curious, very interesting," said 
 Faulkner; and he raised his heavy eyelids for a 
 smiling glance at me, and then let them drop. His 
 face sobered almost to frowning sternness as he 
 went on. "There's a whole region of experience 
 half the map of our life that they tell us must 
 always remain a wilderness, with all its extraordinary 
 phenomena irredeemably savage and senseless. For 
 my part, I don't believe it. I will put the wisdom 
 
56 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 of the ancients before the science of the moderns, 
 and I will say with Elihu, 'In a dream, in a vision 
 of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in 
 slumberings upon the bed ; then He openeth the ears 
 of men, and sealeth their instruction/ " 
 
 "It's noble poetry," I said. 
 
 " It's more than that," said Faulkner. " It 's truth." 
 
 "Perhaps it was in the beginning, when men 
 lived nearer to the origin of life, but I doubt if it 's 
 more than noble poetry now ; though that of course 
 is truth in its way." 
 
 Faulkner opened his eyes and let his legs drop to 
 the ground. I saw that my dissent had excited him, 
 and I was sorry ; I resolved to agree with him at the 
 first possible moment. 
 
 "Why should God be farther from men in our 
 days than he was in Job's ? " he demanded. 
 
 "It isn't that," I said. "It's men who are 
 farther from God." 
 
 " Oh ! That 's a pretty quibble. But it gives you 
 away, all the same. Do you mean to say that if you 
 had a graphic and circumstantial dream, about 
 something of importance to you ; something you 
 intended to do, a journey you intended to take, or an 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 57 
 
 enterprise you were thinking of, and your dream 
 contained a forecast or warning, do you mean to say 
 you wouldn't be influenced by it 1 " 
 
 " Certainly, I should," I answered ; and I couldn't 
 help adding, "or rather the ancestral tent-dweller 
 within me would be influenced." 
 
 " Oh ! " Faulkner sneered. " God's neighbour, or 
 the neighbour of God ? " 
 
 I had made a bad business of trying to agree with 
 him. I braced myself for another effort. "Why, 
 Faulkner, / don't deny anything. All that I contend 
 for is that we should not throw away ' the long result 
 of time,' and return to the bondage of the supersti- 
 tions that cursed the childhood of the race, that 
 blackened every joy of its youth and spread a veil of 
 innocent blood between it and the skies. There may 
 be something in dreams ; if there is, our thoughts, 
 not our fears, will find it out. I am a coward, like 
 everybody else ; perhaps rather more of a coward ; 
 but if I had a dream that contained a forecast or a 
 warning of evil, I should feel it my duty in the 
 interest of civilisation to defy it ; though I don't say 
 I should be able to do it. On the contrary, I think 
 very likely I should lie down under it, and shudder 
 
58 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 out some propitiatory aspiration to the offended 
 fetish that was threatening me." 
 
 Faulkner seemed a little placated. " I understand 
 what you mean ; and I know the danger of giving 
 way to the nervous tremors that vibrate in us from 
 the horrible old times when, on this very coast, a 
 wretched woman would have been caught up and 
 flung in jail, and hung on the gallows because some 
 distempered child had dreamed that it saw her with 
 the Black Man in the forest. But I 'm not ready to 
 say that a dream, recurring and recurring with the 
 clearest circumstance, and without variation in its 
 details, is idle and meaningless. Who is that French- 
 man who wrote about the diseases of personality? 
 Ribot! "Well, he tells how people about to be 
 attacked by disease are ' warned in a dream ' of what 
 is to happen. A man dreams of a mad dog, and 
 wakes up with a malignant ulcer in the spot where 
 he was bitten ; dreams of an epileptic, and wakes to 
 have his first fit ; dreams of a deaf-mute, and wakes 
 with a palsied tongue. He says that these are 
 intimations of calamity from the recesses of the 
 organism to the nerve centres, which we don't notice 
 in the hurly-burly of conscious life." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 59 
 
 " Yes, I remember that passage. And I have had 
 one such experience* myself," I said. 
 
 "Very well, then," said Faulkner. "If in the 
 physical, why not in the moral world? If you 
 dream persistently of evil, of perfidy, of treachery, 
 so distinctly and perfectly bodied forth that when 
 you wake the dream seems the reality, and your 
 consciousness the delusion, why should you treat 
 your vision with contempt ? Why should not the 
 psychologist respect it as something quite as gravely 
 significant in its way as those dream hints of 
 impending malady which no pathologist would 
 ignore 1 " 
 
 I now perceived that I was in the presence of 
 what was on Faulkner's mind. I did not know 
 what it was, and I did not expect that he would tell 
 me. I did not wish him to tell me ; I fancied that 
 I might help him better if I did not know just the 
 make and manner of his trouble ; and I longed to 
 help him, for I saw that he longed for help. I felt 
 that his logic was false, and I believed that he had 
 entangled himself in it only after many attempts to 
 escape it ; but I did not know just which point of 'it 
 to touch first. I felt him looking at me with im- 
 
60 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 ploring challenge, but I did not lift my head till I 
 heard a step in the long, tangled grass, and heard 
 the voice of Dr. Wingate in a cheerful, " Hello ! 
 hello ! You here, March ? Well, that 's good ! " 
 
 Another step, another voice would have been 
 startling ; but these were with us, in a manner, 
 before we heard them, and they brought support and 
 repose with them. 
 
 "I'm glad to see you, doctor," I said, without 
 making ceremony of the greetings which I saw ho 
 was disposed to ignore. 
 
 He shook hands impartially with Faulkner and 
 with me as if he were no more interested in one than 
 the other ; his large, honest, friendly stomach bowed 
 out as he stood a moment wiping the sweat from his 
 forehead, and looking round him. "Isn't this a nice 
 old place 1 I never see this garden without a kind of 
 satisfaction in it as one of the things that money can't 
 buy. There are mighty few of them. But here 's 
 one that only the loss of money can buy. Heigh 1 " 
 
 Wingate sat down, tentatively at first, on the other 
 end of my seat, and faced Faulkner, still without 
 seeming to take any special interest in him. 
 
 I repeated, "I 'm glad to see you, doctor; and I'm 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 61 
 
 particularly glad to sec you in a metaphysical mood, 
 for Faulkner, here,- has got me in a corner, and I 
 want you to get me out." 
 
 "Ah? Am I in a metaphysical mood? What's 
 your corner ? " The doctor worked his elbow into 
 the trellis behind him, and then swayed back 
 on it. 
 
 "We were talking about dreams," I said, "and we 
 had got as far as Ribot, and his instances of dreams 
 that prophesy maladies. You know them." 
 
 "Oh yes. Well?" 
 
 " Well, Faulkner says if a man dreams of physical 
 evil, and the dream is prophetic, or worthy of scien- 
 tific regard, why shouldn't the dream that forebodes 
 moral evil be considered seriously too ; why shouldn't 
 it be held to be truly prophetic ? " 
 
 The doctor smiled. "It seems to me you're 
 pretty easily cornered. I should say that the dream 
 of moral evil should certainly be seriously considered : 
 not as prophetic in the least of what it foreboded, 
 but as prophetic of very grave mental disturbance, 
 if it persisted. I should be afraid that it was the 
 rehearsal of a mania that was soon to burst out in 
 waking madness. If it persisted," said the doctor, 
 
62 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 looking still at me, " and he yielded to it, I should 
 feel anxious for the dreamer's sanity." 
 
 Faulkner sat with his face twisted away from us, 
 as if the doctor had been looking at him, and he 
 wished to avoid his eye. "I don't see," I said, "but 
 what that settles it, Faulkner 1 " 
 
 " Oh, it 's a very good answer in its way," said 
 Faulkner, still without looking at us. "But it takes 
 no account of the spiritual element in such experi- 
 ences." 
 
 " No," said the doctor, " and I should be ashamed 
 of it if it did. As long as we have on this muddy 
 vesture of decay, the less medicine meddles and 
 makes with our immortal part, the better. Of 
 course, I'm not speaking for the Christian Scien- 
 tists." 
 
 " Then you don't consider the mind immortal 1 " 
 demanded Faulkner. 
 
 "I don't consider the brain immortal. And I 
 think I Ve seen the mind in decay." 
 
 We were all silent. I found a comfort in this 
 robust and clear refusal of Wingate's to dally with 
 any sort of ifs and ans, and to deal only with the 
 facts of experience, which I felt must impart itself in 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. G3 
 
 some measure to Faulkner, even through his refusal. 
 At the same time I was a little ashamed of not 
 having myself been able to come to his rescue. The 
 silence prolonged itself, and I began to see that the 
 doctor wished to be alone with his patient, who 
 perhaps was willing to part with me, too. 
 
 Wingate asked, " Where 's Mrs. Faulkner ? " and 
 this gave me my chance to get away with dignity. 
 
 " She and my wife are off at the Point, looking 
 at the rocks. I '11 go and tell her you 've come." 
 
 " Oh, there 's nothing especial. I merely wanted 
 to ask her a few little things. You needn't hurry 
 her back." 
 
 He left his place beside me, and went over to 
 Faulkner, whose wrist he took between his fingers. 
 He had dropped it when I looked back, after I left 
 them, and then, with the distinctness that one sense 
 lends another, I partly heard, partly saw him say : 
 " If you don't, it will not only drive you mad ; it 
 will kill you." 
 
 The doctor's voice came to me in the same key of 
 strenuous, almost angry remonstrance, after I hurried 
 into the lane from the garden, but I could not make 
 out the words any longer. 
 
VIII. 
 
 I REACHED the cliff that overlooked the rocks, and 
 stood a moment staring out on that image of eternity; 
 the infinite waters, seasonless, changeless, boundless. 
 The tide was still coming in, with that slow, resist- 
 less invasion of the land, which is like the closing in 
 of death upon the borders of life. In successive 
 plunges it pounded on the outer reef, and brawled 
 foaming in over the broken granite shore, lifting and 
 tossing the sea-weed of the boulders, which spread 
 and swayed before it like the hair of drowned Titans 
 and lunged into the hollow murmuring caverns, to 
 suck back again, and pull down a stretch of gravelly 
 beach, with a long snarl of the pebbles torn from 
 their beds. A mist was coming up from the farther 
 ocean ; and the sails on the horizon were melting 
 into it. 
 
 I saw my wife down on the rocks near the water, 
 with Nevil; on a height nearer me stood Mrs. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 65 
 
 Faulkner, fronting seaward, a solitary figure that 
 looked wistful on the peak that lifted and defined 
 her against the curtain of the waters. She was quite 
 motionless, like a statue there. She stirred, and 
 exchanged with those below gesticulations of the 
 gay meaningless sort which people make one another 
 for no reason in the presence of scenes of natural 
 grandeur. She faced about, and at sight of me 
 began instantly to run toward me. I waved to her 
 not to come, and hurried down the rocks to meet 
 her. But I could not stop her, and she was quite 
 breathless when we reached each other. 
 
 "What what is it ? " she gasped. 
 
 " Nothing whatever ! " I returned. " Doctor Win- 
 gate is with Mr. Faulkner, and I Ve profited by the 
 opportunity to come off and admire your rocks. 
 Will you tell me how my wife ever got down there 
 alive, or expects to get back 1 " 
 
 "Does he want me 1 Did the doctor send for me 1 ? " 
 
 "Not just at present," I answered her first question. 
 " He asked for you, but he said there was no occasion 
 for hurry ? " 
 
 "Oh, then, I'll go at once," she said, quite as if I 
 had begged her not to lose a moment. 
 E 
 
66 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 My wife and Nevil had now caught sight of us 
 together, and started excitedly up the rocks. I 
 waved and beckoned to them in vain; it was a panic. 
 I laughed to see Nevil clamber upward forgetful of 
 my wife, and then, recollecting her, go back, and 
 pull her after him. At one point of his progress he 
 lost his balance, and rolled down to her feet. Mrs. 
 Faulkner laughed hysterically with me, and then 
 began to cry. 
 
 " He 's up again he isn't hurt ! " I shouted. 
 " Good heavens ! What an unnecessary excitement ! 
 Didn't you all expect me to come ? Did you suppose 
 I could come invisibly 1 " 
 
 "No no! But we expected Mr. Faulkner with 
 you ! " 
 
 "Yes, that's all right. But he preferred to 
 remain with the doctor. I should have stayed myself, 
 if I could have imagined the trouble I was going to 
 make." 
 
 "I will run on," she said. "You can wait for 
 them." 
 
 "Why, there's no occasion for running." But she 
 had already started, and was flying down the long 
 slope that rose to the cliff, and I had no choice but 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. G7 
 
 to wait, and try to keep the others from following 
 her at the same breakneck speed. I was getting 
 angry, and my temper was not improved when my 
 wife called out as soon as she was within ear-shot, 
 "What is it? What is it? Has anything hap- 
 pened ? " 
 
 " No ! Nothing whatever ! " 
 
 " Then what made you wave to us ? You have 
 almost killed us ! " 
 
 " I waved to stop you." 
 
 She did not regard the words. " What is Mrs. 
 Faulkner running so, for ? " 
 
 "You'd better ask her, if you ever overtake her. 
 / don't know. I told her the doctor said she needn't 
 hurry, and she started off like the wind." 
 
 " my goodness ! Is the doctor there ? " 
 
 "Really, my dear," I began; but Nevil interposed 
 in time. 
 
 "We rather expected him to-day," he said to my 
 wife. 
 
 " Oh yes ! Mr. Faulkner said so," she recollected. 
 "But of course Mrs. Faulkner is so anxious about 
 her husband that she can't bear to lose a word of 
 what the doctor says to him." 
 
68 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 "Well, that's something intelligible," I said, as 
 we moved slowly after her ; she was just vanishing 
 into the wilding growth of trees that skirted the old 
 garden. "But you can imagine my astonishment in 
 coming up with a reassuring message, to have it act 
 upon her like a fire-alarm. However, my calming pre- 
 sence seems to have had that effect upon everybody." 
 
 Nevil did not concern himself with my personal 
 grievance. In that tumble of his he must have 
 fallen upon some scene of extinct revelry, for he 
 carried on his back a collection of broken egg-shells, 
 clamshells, bits of charred drift-wood, burnt sea- 
 weed, and other vestiges of a former clam-bake. 
 " Allow me ! " I said, and I brushed some of them 
 off, as he walked and talked along unheeding. 
 
 "No one can imagine," he said, " the -perpetual 
 tension of her anxiety, her incessant devotion." 
 
 " Oh, / can ! " said my wife, with a meritorious 
 effect of being one of the true faith as regarded Mrs. 
 Faulkner, and of excluding me tacitly from the com- 
 munion, which I found much harder to bear than 
 Nevil's indifference. 
 
 " Oh," I said coolly, " isn't it such as any woman 
 would feel in her circumstances 1 " 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 69 
 
 My wife gave me a look that I should have 
 deserved, perhaps, if I had blasphemed. 
 
 "No one," said Nevil, "was ever in quite such 
 painful circumstances. If you had seen the strain 
 she is under, as I have, for a whole year, you would 
 understand this." 
 
 " Yes, yes. Of course. It 's as painful as it can 
 be ; but it isn't more painful than the case of many 
 another woman who has seen her husband suffering, 
 and dying by moments under her eyes." I obeyed a 
 perverse impulse to go on and say, though I felt my 
 wife's eyes dwelling in horrified reproach upon me, 
 " I don't mean to depreciate Mrs. Faulkner in any 
 sense, or to question the exquisite poignancy of her 
 trials and her self-sacrifice." 
 
 " But you do \ " said my wife. " You do loth ! 
 You are talking of something you don't know about. 
 If you did, you couldn't or, I hope at least you 
 wouldn't- talk so." 
 
 Nevil said, with the humane wish to mitigate the 
 effect of her seventy, " Mrs. March has divined the 
 peculiarly painful feature in the case. It isn't a thing 
 we should have ventured to speak of, if we hadn't 
 somehow seemed to approach it simultaneously." 
 
70 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " You mean," I said, " his aversion to her 1 " 
 
 " Yes ! " answered Nevil, in astonishment. " Have 
 you have you noticed it, too ? " 
 
 "From the first moment I saw them together. 
 But it wasn't a thing I could make sure of until 
 now. I suppose I was waiting to approach it 
 simultaneously, too." 
 
 Nevil did not heed the little jibe, and my wife 
 noticed it only to contemn it with a look. " And 
 how do you account for it ? " he implored. " How 
 can you explain such a terrible thing ? That he 
 should have conceived this unkindness, this repul- 
 sion for that hapless creature, whose whole existence 
 is centred in her love of him 1 Ah, you haven't 
 
 seen There have been times I suppose I 
 
 am speaking to friends of his who feel exactly as 
 I do about him ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, indeed ! " cried my wife, as one in 
 authority for both of us. 
 
 "There have been times, within the past six 
 months, and especially during the past month, when, 
 if I hadn't known it was the same man, I could 
 hardly have believed it was Faulkner, in his treat- 
 ment of her." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 71 
 
 " Perhaps it wasn't Faulkner," I suggested. 
 
 "You mean that 
 
 "He isn't himself. You mentioned it." 
 
 "Yes. I should be glad to believe that, some- 
 times, dreadful as it is. It 's so much less dreadful 
 than the idea that he could change toward her in 
 this hour of their dire need and mutual helplessness ; 
 and should leave her widowed of his love before she 
 is widowed of his life." Nevil went on, "You 
 couldn't at all appreciate the situation unless you 
 had known them together from the beginning of 
 their acquaintance, as I have. In fact, I was the 
 means of bringing them together ; at least I intro- 
 duced them to each other. With him it was a case 
 of love at first sight. He was much older than she 
 ten or twelve years ; but I don't believe anybody 
 had ever struck Faulkner's fancy before, in spite of 
 all that talk about Miss Ludlow." 
 
 " Oh," I said, with a smile of reminiscence, "every- 
 body was expected to be in love with Miss Ludlow 
 and to be rejected by her." 
 
 "I'm sure Faulkner was neither," said Nevil. 
 "You know his romantic nature. He kept it hidden 
 in his public life, but in all his personal relations ho 
 
72 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 gave it full play. He's a man who has lived the 
 poetry that another man would have written ; and 
 he 's such a great soul that I think it rather pleased 
 him to be that one of the two who must always love 
 the most, in every marriage. To give more love 
 than she gave him, I think he was glad to do that, 
 and that he looked forward to all the future as the 
 field for winning her to a love as perfect as the trust 
 which she had in him. He used to talk with me 
 about it before they were married you know how 
 boyishly simple-hearted he always was; of course 
 since that, not a syllable. But his victory came 
 sooner than he could have expected. Shortly after 
 their marriage in fact on their wedding journey to 
 Europe she fell very sick, and hovered between 
 life and death, for a long time. He made himself 
 her nurse .; he wouldn't allow any one else to come 
 near her; he brought her back to health and the 
 full strength of her youth. I don't know whether 
 I ought to repeat a conjecture of Dr. Wingate's it 's 
 merely a conjecture, and Mrs. Faulkner of course 
 has never heard the slightest hint of it. But you 
 know Faulkner was always a delicate fellow, with a 
 force that was entirely nervous ; and the doctor 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 73 
 
 once said to me that he might have developed the 
 tendency he was born with, by overtasking himself 
 in care of her. The bending over, so much, was 
 bad ; the lifting, in that posture ; and then, when 
 she left her bed, he used to carry her about in his 
 arms, up and down stairs, and everywhere." 
 
 " Ah ! " sighed my wife, "how cruel life is ! But 
 how beautiful, how grand ! " 
 
 "A nature," I said, without looking at her, " that 
 might impress the casual observer as a mere sop of 
 sentiment, is often capable of that sort of devotion. 
 In fact I suppose that the people we call sentimen. 
 talists are merely poets who lack the artistic faculty 
 of expression, and have to live their poetry, as you 
 say, instead of writing it." 
 
 I spoke to Nevil, but he replied to my wife, who 
 cried out, "Oh, I hope she'll never know it! I 
 hope she '11 die without knowing it ! " 
 
 "She's a woman who could bear to know it," he 
 said, "if any woman ever could. But if she had 
 known it she could not possibly have lived more 
 singly for him than she has done ever since. I don't 
 know," he went on in a kind of muse, " whether her 
 devotion was love in the usual way. It has always 
 
74 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 seemed to me to ignore that, to leave that out of the 
 question; perhaps to take that for granted, as a 
 trivial thing that need hardly be reckoned in the 
 large account. Their not having children, that, too, 
 has kept them in a way, like a j'oung couple ; they 
 have had only each other to dedicate themselves to. 
 I don't mean that they have not had higher 
 interests, spiritual interests. Faulkner, you know, 
 has always been a faithful churchman, and 
 Mrs. Faulkner, in her way it may be your way, 
 too " 
 
 " We are Unitarians/' said my wife firmly. 
 
 Nevil bowed tolerantly. "Mrs. Faulkner is a 
 very religious person : But one could not live with 
 them, as I have done, for months at a time, and now 
 for a whole year past, without seeing that he was 
 first of all things with her. She was what St. Paul 
 describes the wife to be. She took thought of the 
 things of this world, how she might please her hus- 
 band. And. she did please him. Even after his 
 physical trouble began to show itself or to be dis- 
 tressing she made him exquisitely happy, so happy 
 that I trembled for him, knowing that change must 
 come to every state, and since nothing could bring 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 75 
 
 him more happiness, something must bring him less. 
 And then, this blight came." 
 
 As he spoke Nevil knit his fingers together, 
 and rent them apart in an anguish of pity, of 
 sympathy. 
 
 " And you can't imagine you have no clew no 
 hint " my wife began. 
 
 "No. No. No. He keeps the horror, whatever 
 it is, wholly to himself. I think if he could tell 
 somebody he could escape it. But he can't ! The 
 one thing evident is, that it somehow refers to her ; 
 and so he can't speak ! " We walked on in silence 
 a moment, and then Nevil began again falteringly, 
 "If if Faulkner, if he had ever shown the slightest 
 question of her the least anxiety the smallest 
 wavering, with or without reason, you might suppose 
 it was jealousy, in some suppressed form. But there 
 never was anything of that ! He is too noble, too 
 magnanimous for that ; he honours her too devoutly. 
 Ah-h-h!" 
 
 He went along with his head fallen, and his hands 
 clinging together behind him. We were very near 
 the gate of the old garden. When he reached it he 
 turned and said to us, " I almost dread to see them 
 
76 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 together ; I always dread to see them : his aversion, 
 and her bewilderment " 
 
 I did not accuse the man of anything wrong in his 
 intense feeling; in my heart I pitied him as the 
 victim of a situation which he ought never to have 
 witnessed, which should have been known only to 
 the two doomed necessarily to suffer in it. I wanted 
 to say to my wife that here was another instance, 
 and perhaps the most odious we could ever know, of 
 the evil of that disgusting three-cornered domestic 
 arrangement which we had both always so cordially 
 reprobated. But I had no chance for that. In fact 
 we found ourselves in the presence of a scene from 
 which we should all have retired, no doubt, if we 
 had known just how. Dr. Wingate was standing in 
 the arbour, looking down at Faulkner, who sat in the 
 place where I had left him. But now his wife sat 
 beside him, and held his hand in her left, while she 
 had drawn his head over on her shoulder with her 
 right. I fancied, from the weak and fallen look of 
 his face, with its closed eyes, that he had just 
 recovered from one of those agonies. 
 
 The stir of our feet, or rather the cessation of it 
 as we came involuntarily to a stop in the grass, roused 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 77 
 
 the group in the arbour. Dr. "Wingate and Mrs. 
 Faulkner turned their heads towards us ; Faulkner 
 opened his eyes. He remained looking a moment, 
 as if he did not see us. Then his gaze seemed to 
 grow and centre upon Nevil. He flung his wife's 
 hand away, and started suddenly to his feet and 
 made a pace toward us. 
 
 She rose, too, and " Ah, Douglas ! " she cried out. 
 
 He put his hand on her breast and pushed her 
 away with a look of fierce rejection. Then he 
 caught at his own heart ; a change, the change that 
 shall come upon every living face, came upon his face. 
 He fell back upon the seat, and his head sank for- 
 ward. 
 
PART SECOND. HEEMI A. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE death of Faulkner precipitated in the same 
 compassion all the doubts and reserves of its wit- 
 nesses. Perhaps one of the reasons why sickness 
 and death are in the world is that they humanise 
 through the sympathies the nature that health and 
 life imbrute. They link in the chain which must 
 one day gall every mortal the strong and happy 
 with the weak and sorrowing, and unite us in the 
 consciousness of a common doom if not the hope of 
 a common redemption. " Some day," each of us 
 tries to realise to himself in their presence, " I shall 
 suffer so ; some day I shall lie dumb and cold like 
 that ; " and at least we perceive that it is the 
 mystery of our origin speaking to us in those 
 groans, in that silence, of the mystery of our des- 
 tiny. We have no refuge then but to forget our- 
 selves in pity ; and it is sorrow and shame for ever 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 79 
 
 if we fail of it. The pity of those who saw Faulkner 
 die was not for him. He was swiftly past all that. 
 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he had 
 been changed. The fire that burned so fiercely, the 
 flame that was the sum of his passions, his hates, 
 his loves had been quenched in a breath ; but his 
 end had been such as each of us might desire for 
 himself if he were at peace with himself. 
 
 A little wind, cold, keen, stirring the leaves over- 
 head and the long grass underfoot, was coming in 
 from the sea ; the sun was growing pale before the 
 rising fog ; the roar of the ocean seemed solidly to 
 fill the air. I do not know how long we stood still. 
 All of us knew that Faulkner was dead ; no one 
 made the ghastly pretence that he had fallen in a 
 faint ; but none of us recognised the fact till my 
 wife, with a burst of tears, took his widow in her 
 arms. Then it was as if we had each wept, and 
 found freedom to move, to speak, to act, by giving 
 way to. our grief. 
 
 Mrs. March had never before had occasion in our 
 happy life to deal with such an event, and now her 
 instinct of usefulness surprised me ; or rather it 
 afterward surprised me, when I thought of it. From 
 
80 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 moment to moment she knew what to do, and she 
 knew what to make me do. The doctor, whose office 
 was with life, went away ; and the priest, whose 
 calling concerned after-life, was so stunned by what 
 had happened, that he remained helpless in the 
 presence of death. If it had not been for my wife 
 and myself, I hardly know who would have grappled 
 with all those details which present themselves in 
 such a situation with the same imperative claim 
 upon us as eating, drinking, and sleeping, and the 
 other commonplace needs of existence. I was struck 
 by their equality with these; in their order, they 
 came like anything else. 
 
 Just before dark my wife sent me back to our 
 children at Lynn. " Poor little things ! They will be 
 frightened to death at our staying so long ; and you 
 must explain to them as well as you can why I didn't 
 come with you. Mrs. Wakely will get them to bed 
 for you ; and be sure that you see they have a light 
 burning in the hall, if they 're nervous without it. 
 You won't be needed here. Of course I can't leave 
 her now. You must do the best you can without me." 
 
 " Yes ; yes," I said. " But how strange, Isabel, 
 that we should be mixed up with these unhappy 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 81 
 
 people in this way ! Do you remember the critical 
 mood in which we came here to-day ? " 
 
 " Yes, perhaps we Ve always been too critical, and 
 held ourselves too much aloof tried to escape ties." 
 
 " Death won't let us escape them, even if life 
 will," I answered, and for the first time I had a 
 perception of the necessary solidarity of human 
 affairs from the beginning to the end, in which no 
 one can do or be anything to himself alone. " It 
 makes very little difference now what that poor 
 man's taste in literature and art was. It seems a 
 great while ago since we smiled at him for it. Was 
 it only this morning ? " 
 
 " This morning ? It seems a thousand years in 
 some pre-existence. ;J 
 
 " Why, it was in a pre-existence for him \ " 
 
 " Yes, how strange that is ! " 
 
II. 
 
 I DID not see Wingate again till I met him at 
 our first dinner in the fall. Then, as we sat at our 
 corner together, with our comfortable little cups of 
 black coffee before us, at a sufficient distance from 
 the others, who had broken up the order of the 
 table, and grouped themselves in twos and threes 
 for the good talk that comes last at such a time, we 
 began to speak of the Faulkners. They had pro- 
 bably been in both our minds, vaguely and vividly, 
 the whole evening. He asked me if I had heard 
 anything from Mrs. Faulkner lately ; and I said, 
 Oh yes; my wife heard from her pretty often, 
 though irregularly ; and I told him how, with 
 every intention and prepossession to the contrary, 
 my wife had grown into what I might call an inti- 
 mate friendship with her. The widow had gone 
 back to the city where Faulkner and I had lived 
 together, and had taken up her life again in the 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 83 
 
 old place, with the old surroundings and the old 
 associations, 
 
 " Then you were not especially intimate with him 
 when you lived there 1 " 
 
 " No," I said, " it was a friendly acquaintance for 
 a while, and then it was an unfriendly non-acquaint- 
 ance ; " and I explained how. " To tell you the 
 truth, I never cared a great deal for him; and I 
 w r as surprised to find that he seemed to care a good 
 deal for me ; though perhaps what seemed affection 
 for me was only the appeal for sympathy that a 
 dying man addresses to the whole earth." 
 
 " Perhaps," said the doctor. 
 
 "I hope I don't appear very cold-hearted. I 
 liked his friend the parson a great deal better, and 
 for no more reason than I liked Faulkner less. 
 Faulkner was a sentimental idealist; he tried to 
 live the rather high-strung literature that he might 
 have written if his lot had been cast in a literary 
 community. You understand ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I have known several such men in the West ; 
 they 're rather characteristic of a new country." 
 
 " Yes ; I can understand how. I didn't know but 
 
84 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 you had been intimate," said Wingate, in a half tone 
 of disappointment. 
 
 I recognised it with a laugh. "Well, Faulkner 
 was intimate, doctor, if I wasn't. Will that serve 
 the purpose ? " 
 
 " I 'm not sure." The doctor broke off the ash of 
 his cigar on the edge of his saucer. " I should like 
 to ask one thing," he said. 
 
 " Ask away ! " 
 
 He hitched his chair nearer me, setting it sidewise 
 of the table, on which he rested his left arm, and 
 then dropped his face on his lifted hand. " That 
 day, just before I came, had he been telling you his 
 dream ? " 
 
 II No." 
 
 The doctor now used a whole tone of disappoint- 
 ment. " Well, I 'm sorry. I should have liked to 
 talk it over with you." 
 
 " You can't be half so sorry as I am. I should 
 like immensely to talk it over. I always had a 
 fancy that his dream killed him." 
 
 " Oh no ! oh no ! " said the doctor, with a smile 
 at my unscientific leap to the conclusion. 
 
 " Hastened it, then." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 85 
 
 " We can't say, very decidedly, whether a death 
 is hastened or not that kind. The man was de- 
 stined to die soon, and to die what is called sud- 
 denly. He might have died at that very moment 
 and in that precise way if he had never had any 
 such dream. Undoubtedly it wore upon him. But 
 I should say it was an effect rather than a cause of 
 his condition. There 's where you outsiders are apt 
 to make your mistakes in these recondite cases. 
 You want something dramatic like what you've 
 read of and you 're fond of supposing that a man's 
 trouble of mind caused his disease, when it was his 
 disease caused his trouble of mind : the physical 
 affected the moral, and not the moral the physical." 
 " You mean that his mind was clouded 1 " 
 The doctor laughed. "No, I didn't mean that. 
 But it 's true, all the same. His mind was clouded, 
 by the pain he had suffered, perhaps, and his dream 
 came out of the cloud in his mind, If he had lived, 
 it would have resulted in mania, as I told him sub- 
 stantially that day. But it was very curious, its re- 
 currence and its unvarying circumstantiality. I don't 
 know that I ever knew anything just like it ; though 
 there 's a kind of similarity in all these cases." 
 
86 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 I saw that Wingate would like to tell me what 
 Faulkner's dream was ; but I knew that he would 
 not do so unless he could fully justify the confidence 
 to his professional conscience. I said to myself that 
 I should not tempt him, but I tried to tempt him. 
 "He told you how long he had been having his 
 dream 1 " 
 
 The doctor appeared not to have heard my ques- 
 tion. " And you say she has gone back to their old 
 place ? " 
 
 " Yes, and to every circumstance of their life as 
 nearly as possible." I did not like his running away 
 with my bait in that fashion very well, but I thought 
 ifc best to give him all the line he wanted, and then 
 play him back as I could. " You know but of course 
 you don't know that his mother always lived with 
 them when they were at home or they lived with 
 her; it was the old lady's house, I believe; and 
 the widow has even repeated that feature of their 
 former manage, and has her mother-in-law with her." 
 
 " And what 's become of the parson 1 " 
 
 " The parson ? Oh Nevil ! Nevil 's given up 
 his parish there, and gone further West to Kansas, 
 where he has charge of a sort of mission church I 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 87 
 
 don't understand the mechanism of those things 
 very well and is doing some good work. I believe 
 he has ritualised somewhat. That seems to be the 
 way with them when they take to practical Chris- 
 tianity. Curious; but it's so." 
 
 " And she lives with her mother-in-law," the doctor 
 mused aloud. " Property tied up so she had to ? " 
 
 "No. I think not. It seems to be quite her 
 own choice. I dare say they get on very well. 
 The old lady is romantic, I believe, like Faulkner ; 
 and probably she 's in love with her daughter-in-law." 
 
 " Well," said the doctor, " it isn't a situation that 
 every woman could reconcile herself to, under the 
 best conditions. But if she thought she ought to 
 do it, she would do it. She has pluck enough. I 
 should like to tell you one thing," and the doctor 
 hitched his chair a little closer as he said this, and 
 again he broke the ash of his cigar off on his saucer. 
 
 He did not go on at once, and, lest it might be 
 for want of prompting, I said, " Well ? " 
 
 "I* don't know whether this is something your 
 wife ever knew about or not 1 " he began askingly. 
 
 "Really, I can't say," I answered impatiently, 
 " till I know myself." 
 
88 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 He did not mind mjr impatience, but pulled com- 
 fortably at his cigar for a moment before he went 
 on. " She came to my office with her." 
 
 "When they went to see you just before she 
 started West ? I understood she called on business." 
 
 " To pay my bill ? Yes, and then she asked to 
 see me alone. I suppose your wife thought she 
 wished to consult me ; and so did I. But it wasn't 
 the usual kind of consultation ; in fact she wasn't 
 the usual kind of woman ! She didn't lose an 
 instant ; she went right at me. ' Doctor,' said she, 
 ' do you know what was on my husband's mind 1 ' 
 I like to deal with any one I can be honest with, 
 and I saw I could be honest with her. ' Yes,' I said, 
 'he told me.' She caught her breath a little, and 
 then said she, ' Can you tell me the form, the kind 
 of trouble it was ?' * Yes,' I said, 'it was a dream. 
 A dream that kept coming, again and again, and 
 finally had begun to colour his waking thoughts and 
 impressions.' She gave another gasp I can see her 
 now, just how she looked with the black crape 
 round her face, all pale and washed out with weep- 
 ing and then she asked, l Did it relate to me ? ' 
 'Yes,' I said, 'it related to you, Mrs. Faulkner,' 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 89 
 
 She came right back at me. 'Doctor Wingate/ 
 said she, 'is it something that he could ever have 
 told me, if he had lived ? ' I had to think a while 
 before I said, ' No, as I understood his character, I 
 don't think he ever could.' She came right back 
 again I could see that she had made up her mind 
 to go through it all in a certain way, and that she 
 was ready for anything and said she, 'I know 
 that whatever it was, he was always struggling 
 against it ; and that when it forced itself upon him, 
 he did not believe it at the bottom of his heart. 
 I have seen that ; and now I will only ask you one 
 thing more. Is it something that for his sake 
 riot for mine, remember ! you wouldn't wish me to 
 know 1 ' 'I would rather you wouldn't know it, for 
 his sake,' said I. ' Then/ said she, ' that is all,' and 
 she got up, and put out her hand to me, and gave 
 mine a grip as strong as a man's, and went out." 
 
 " Splendid ! " I said, overmastering my own dis- 
 appointment, and wishing that in my interest Mrs. 
 Faulkner had been a little less heroic. 
 
 " Splendid 1 " said Wingate. " It was super- 
 human ! Or superwoman. Just think of the 
 burden she shouldered for life ! I don't know how 
 
90 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 much or how little she had divined, but all the 
 worse if she had divined anything. She denied 
 herself the satisfaction of her curiosity, and left me 
 to make whatever I chose of her motives. She 
 didn't explain; she simply asked and acted. I 
 might suspect this, or I might suppose that ; she left 
 me free. I never saw such nerve. It was superb." 
 
 " Perhaps a little topping," I suggested. 
 
 "Yes, perhaps a little topping," the doctor con- 
 sented. "But still, it was a toppingness that could 
 have consisted only with the most perfect con- 
 science, the most absolute freedom from self-re- 
 proach in every particular." 
 
 " C'etait magnifique, mais ce ri'e'tait pas la guerre, 
 I think I should have preferred a little more human 
 nature in mine. I should have 'liked her better if 
 she had gone down on her knees to you, and begged 
 you tell her what it was ; and when you had told 
 her, if it inculpated her at all, would never have left 
 you till you had exculpated her. That would have 
 been more like a woman." 
 
 "Yes, much more like most women," said the 
 doctor. " But the type is not the nation, or the race, 
 or the sex. The type is cheap, dirt cheap. It's 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 91 
 
 the variation from the type that is the character, 
 the individual, the valuable and venerable per- 
 sonality." 
 
 " Since when did you set up hero-worship, doctor 1 
 Eeally, you 're worse than my wife. But I expect 
 her to be worse than you when I tell her this story 
 of Mrs. Faulkner. I suppose you will let me tell 
 her?" 
 
 " Oh yes. I suppose you would tell her whether 
 I let you or not." 
 
 "There's always a danger of that kind," I 
 admitted. 
 
 "I wonder," said Wingate, " whether the eager- 
 ness of women to hear things isn't a natural result 
 from the eagerness of men to tell them." 
 
 "Possibly they may have spoiled us in that way. 
 Do you think you were as eager not to tell as Mrs. 
 Faulkner was not to hear 1 " 
 
 The doctor laughed tolerantly. 
 
III. 
 
 I WAS surprised at the way my wife took the 
 doctor's story when I repeated it to her the next 
 morning at breakfast. 
 
 "Well," she said, "that is the first thing I've 
 ever heard of Mrs. Faulkner that I don't like." 
 
 " It was certainly a base treason to her sex to go 
 back on its reputation for curiosity in that manner." 
 
 " Oh, it was enough like a woman to do that a 
 certain kind of woman." 
 
 " The poseuse 1 " 
 
 " The worse than poseuse. The kind of woman 
 that overtasks her strength, and breaks down with 
 what she 's undertaken, and makes us all ridiculous, 
 and discourages us from trying to bear what we 
 really could bear." 
 
 " Doctor Wingate admires her immensely for her 
 courage in trying it." 
 
 "And I suppose you admire her too." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 93 
 
 "No. When it comes to that, I'm all woman 
 the kind of Avoman that wouldn't attempt more than 
 she could perform, unless she could get some man to 
 carry out her enterprise for her. But perhaps she 
 might do that." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " 
 
 " I don't mean ivhat, at all. I mean whom. Nevil.* 
 
 "Basil," said my wife, "when you talk that way 
 you make me lose all respect for you. No. She 
 may be too exalted, but at least she isn't degraded." 
 
 " She couldn't very well be both," I admitted. 
 
 " And it shows what a really low idea you have 
 of women, my dear. I 'm sorry for you." 
 
 " Bless my soul ! Why do you object to her 
 being superwoman, as Wingate says, in one way, 
 and not superwoman in another ? " 
 
 " We both agreed, from the very beginning, that 
 that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him 
 and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, 
 and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She 
 ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so 
 sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then 
 be subjected to to anything that people were mean 
 enough to think." 
 
94 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " Why not say base enough, vile enough, grovel- 
 ling enough, crawling-in-the-mire enough 1 " 
 
 "Very well, then, I will say that. And I will 
 say that any one who will insinuate such a thing is 
 as bad as bad as Faulkner himself." 
 
 " But not so much to blame, I hope. At least I 
 didn't bring Nevil into his family." 
 
 " You admired him ! " 
 
 "Yes, if I may say it without further offence, I 
 liked him. I pitied him ; it seemed to me that he 
 was the chief victim of Faulkner's fondness. He 
 couldn't get away without inhumanity; but I believe 
 he was thoroughly bored by the situation. He felt 
 it to be ridiculous." 
 
 " And she, what did she think of it 1 " 
 
 "I don't believe she thought of it at all. She 
 was preoccupied with her husband. He had to stay 
 and simply look on, and see her suffer, because he 
 couldn't get away. It was an odious predicament." 
 
 "Yes. I think it was too," said my wife. "And 
 I felt sorry for him, though I didn't admire him. 
 And I must say that he escaped from his false posi- 
 tion as quickly and as completely as possible." 
 
 " Ah, I don't know that I Ve altogether liked his 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 95 
 
 leaving the town. That looked, if anything, a little 
 conscious. I should have preferred his staying and 
 living it all down." 
 
 " There was nothing to live down ! " 
 
 "No; nothing." 
 
 " You are talking so detestably," said my wife, 
 " that I Ve got a great mind not to tell you some- 
 thing." 
 
 I folded my hands in supplication. "Oh, I will 
 behave ! I will behave ! Don't keep anything more 
 from me, my dear. Think what I Ve endured already 
 from the fortitude of Mrs. Faulkner ! " 
 
 " The letter came last night, by the last distribu- 
 tion, after you'd gone to your dinner," said Mrs. 
 March, feeling in her pocket for it, which was always 
 a work of time : a woman has to rediscover her 
 pocket whenever she uses it. " He 's engaged." 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 " Who 1 Mr. Nevil. Now, what do you have to 
 say?" 
 
 I threw myself forward in astonishment. " What J 
 Already ! Why it isn't six months since " 
 
 " Basil ! " cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible 
 warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself 
 
96 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 very elaborately, after that. Even then it was with 
 great hauteur and distance that she said, " He 's 
 engaged to a young lady of his parish out there. 
 The letter's from Mrs. Faulkner." She tossed it 
 across the table to me with a disdain for my low 
 condition that would have wounded a less fallen 
 spirit. But I was glad of the letter on any terms, 
 and I eagerly pulled it open and flattened it out; 
 
 " Just read it aloud, please," commanded my wife, 
 from her remote height, and I meekly obeyed. 
 
 " * DEAR MRS. MARCH, You will be surprised to 
 get a letter from me so soon after the last I wrote ; 
 but I have a piece of news which has excited us all 
 here a good deal, and which I think will interest 
 you and Mr. March. Mr. Nevirhas just written my 
 mother, Mrs. Faulkner, of his engagement.' 
 
 " What an astonishing woman ! " I broke off. 
 " Why in the world didn't she keep it for the post- 
 script, after she had palavered over forty or fifty 
 pages about nothing ? " 
 
 " Because," said my wife, " she isn't an ordinary 
 woman in any way. Go on." 
 
 I went on. 
 
 " ' His letter is rather incoherent, of course. But 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 97 
 
 he tells us she is very young, and he encloses a 
 photograph to show us that she is pretty. She is 
 more than that, however; she is a beautiful girl; 
 but the photograph does not paint character, and so 
 we have to take Mr. Nevil's word for the fact that 
 she is very good, and cultivated, and affectionate.'" 
 
 " Affectionate, of course ! " I broke off again ; and 
 my wife came down from her high horse long enough 
 to laugh ; and then instantly got back again. 
 
 " ' He seems very much in love, and we feel as 
 happy as we can about him without knowing his 
 fiancte. He has been so long like a son to Mrs. 
 Faulkner, that of course it is a little pang to her, 
 but she reconciles herself to losing him by thinking 
 of his good. I am thoroughly glad, for I think his 
 life was very lonely, and that he longed for com- 
 panionship. He is of a very simple nature you 
 cannot always see it under the ecclesiasticism and 
 I think he has missed Douglas almost as much as we 
 have. He hints in his letter that if Douglas were 
 living, and the old place here could welcome him as 
 of old, he could wish for no other home.' " 
 
 " Look here, Isabel ! " I broke off again. " These 
 seem to me rather wild and whirling words. If Mrs. 
 G 
 
98 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Faulkner mire is so very happy, why does she have 
 a little pang and have to brace up by thinking of 
 his good ? And if Mr. Nevil is so very ecstatic 
 about his betrothed, why does he intimate that if 
 the old home of his friends could still be his, he 
 would not want a new home of his own ? " 
 
 " That is very weak in him," my wife admitted. 
 
 " Yes ; let 's hope the future Mrs. Nevil may never 
 get hold of that letter of his. She probably hates 
 the very name of Faulkner already." 
 
 11 If you will go on," said my wife, " you will see 
 what Hermia says of all that." 
 
 " Hannah," I corrected her ; but I went on. 
 
 "'I suppose,' " the letter ran, " ' that this is the 
 last of Mr. Nevil, as far as we are concerned. I 
 could not adopt his old friends, if I were in her 
 place, and I am persuading Mrs. Faulkner to disap- 
 pear out of his life as promptly and as voluntarily as 
 possible, after his marriage. I know that this is one 
 of the things that men laugh at us for ; but I cannot 
 help it, and I grieve to think now that I could not 
 help showing poor Douglas that his friends were 
 less welcome to me than they were to him. Mrs. 
 Faulkner sees the matter as I do ; but she will have 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 99 
 
 to play the part of mother-in-law at least so far as 
 the infare is concerned. Mr. Nevil has no relations 
 of his own (he is the most bereft and orphaned per- 
 son I ever knew), and she has asked him to bring 
 his bride here as he would to his mother's house. 
 Of course, it will all be very quiet ; but we must go 
 through some social form of welcome. The marriage 
 is to be very soon in a month. I will write you 
 about it.' " 
 
 I folded up the letter and gave it back to Mrs. 
 March. 
 
 " Now, what have you got to say ? " she de- 
 manded. 
 
 " I ? Oh ! May I ask why you didn't tell me 
 about this letter in the beginning, instead of allow- 
 ing me to go on with my defamatory conjectures 1 " 
 
 "I wanted to see you cover yourself with con- 
 fusion ; I wished to give you a lesson." 
 
 "Pshaw, Isabel! You know that you were so 
 curious about what Wingate told me that it put the 
 letter all out of your head." 
 
 " And do you say now," she retorted, quite as if 
 she had got the better of me, and were making one 
 triumph follow upon another, " do you still mean to 
 
100 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 say that she expected to get him to help her bear 
 the the shadow of Faulkner's dream ? " 
 
 " Isn't that rather attenuating it ? " I asked. But 
 upon reflection I found that the phrase accurately 
 expressed the case. " Why, yes, that 's just what it 
 is. It 's the burden of a shadow ! In spite of 
 Wingate's scientific reluctances, I believe that it 
 crushed poor Faulkner ; and I 'm glad the weight of 
 it isn't to fall upon her or upon Nevil. Weight ! 
 .Why, Isabel, that letter has simply removed moun- 
 tains from my mind ! And the affair was really 
 none of my business, either." 
 
 " Yes, I 'm glad it 's all over," said my wife, with 
 a sigh of relief. " Now I can respect her without 
 the slightest reservation." 
 
 "And isn't it strange," I suggested, "that this 
 kind of burden she can bear alone, but if she had 
 divided it with him she could not bear it ? " 
 
 " Yes, it 's strange," she answered. " And, as you 
 say, this letter is a great relief. Dr. Wingate may 
 account for it all on scientific grounds if he chooses, 
 and say that Faulkner's disease caused the dream, 
 and not the dream his disease. But if this had not 
 happened, if this engagement did not give the lie so 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 101 
 
 distinctly to the worst that we ever thought when 
 we thought our worst about it, I never could have 
 felt exactly easy. There would always have been, 
 don't you know, the misgiving that there was a 
 consciousness of something drawing them together 
 during his life that frightened them apart after his 
 death. But now I feel perfectly sure ! " 
 
 There had never been any doubt with us as to the 
 nature of Faulkner's dream, though we could only 
 conjecture its form and facts. Sometimes these 
 appeared to us very gross and palpable, and again 
 merely a vaguely accusing horror, a ghastly adum- 
 bration, a mere sensation, a swiftly vanishing im- 
 pression. We had talked it over a great deal at 
 first, and then it had faded more and more out of 
 our minds. We had our own cares, our own con- 
 cerns, which were naturally first with us ; and I feel 
 that in giving the idea of our preoccupation with 
 those of others, however interesting, however fasci- 
 nating, I am contributing to one of those false 
 effects of perspective which have always annoyed 
 me in history. The events of the past are pressed 
 together in that retrospect, as if the past were en- 
 tirely composed of events, and not, like the present, 
 
102 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 of long intermediate stretches and spaces of event- 
 lessness, which the rapidly approaching lines and 
 the vanishing-point can give no hint of. In spite 
 of everything, since the story only secondarily con- 
 cerns ourselves, we must appear concerned in it 
 alone, though for that very reason we ought to be 
 able to seem what we really were : spectators giving 
 it a sympathetic and appreciative glance now and 
 then, while we kept about our own business. 
 
IV. 
 
 FOR a while we expected with vivid interest 
 Mrs. Faulkner's account of the infare, and her 
 description of the bride, and of the bridegroom in 
 his new relations. Then we ceased to talk of it, 
 and I, at least, forgot all about it. The time for her 
 letter had passed when it came, and then we reckoned 
 up the weeks since the last one came, and found 
 that this was almost a month overdue. When we 
 had ascertained this fact, my wife opened the letter, 
 and began to snatch a phrase from this page and 
 another from that, turning to the last and returning 
 to the first, in that provoking way women have 
 with a letter, instead of reading it solidly through 
 from beginning to end. As she did this I saw her 
 eyes dilate, and she grew more and more excited. 
 
 "Well, well?" I called out to her, when this 
 spectacle became intolerable. 
 
 " Oh, my dear, my dear ! " she answered, and 
 
104 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 went on snatching significant fragments from the 
 letter. 
 
 "What is it? Doesn't the bride suit? Was 
 Nevil too silly about her ? Were the dresses from 
 Worth's ? Or what 's the matter 1 " 
 
 " The engagement the engagement is off/ Nevil 
 is perfectly killed by it, and he's back on their 
 hands, down sick, and they're taking care of him. 
 Oh, horrors upon horrors ! I never heard of any- 
 thing so dreadful ! And the details well, the 
 whole thing is simply inexpressible ! " 
 
 "Suppose you give Mrs. Faulkner a chance at 
 the inexpressible. I 'd rather hear of the calamity 
 at first hands and in a mass, than have it doled out 
 to me piecemeal by a third person, and snatched 
 back at every mouthful." I put out my hand for 
 the letter, and after a certain hesitation my wife 
 gave it me. 
 
 " Well, see what you can make of it." 
 
 " I shall make nothing of it ; I shall leave that to 
 the facts." 
 
 These appeared to be that the engagement had 
 gone on like other engagements up to a certain 
 point. The preparations were made; the dresses 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 105 
 
 were bought ; the presents were provided, presum- 
 ably with the usual fatuity and reluctance; the 
 cards were out; the day was fixed. All this had 
 gone forward with no hint of misgiving from the 
 young lady. She seemed excited, Nevil could 
 remember, but to seem excited in such circum- 
 stances was to seem natural. Suddenly, a week 
 before the day fixed for the wedding she discovered 
 that she had make a mistake : she could never have 
 truly loved him, and now she was sure that she did 
 not love him at all. She was not fit to be a clergy- 
 man's wife; she never could make him happy. 
 He must release her ; that was the substance of it ; 
 but there were decorative prayers to be forgiven and 
 forgotten and accepted in the relation of a friend. 
 She was the only daughter of rich and vulgar 
 parents, and her father added a secret anguish to 
 Nevil's open shame by offering to make it right 
 with him in any sum he would name ; the million- 
 aire wished to act handsomely. Nevil could perhaps 
 have borne both the secret anguish and the open 
 shame ; but the Sunday edition of the leading news- 
 paper of the place found the affair a legitimate field 
 of journalistic enterprise. It gave column after 
 
106 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 column of imagined and half -imagined detail; it 
 gave biographical sketches of what it called the 
 high retracting parties ; it gave Nevil's portrait, the 
 young lady's portrait, the portraits of the young 
 lady's parents. It was immensely successful, and it 
 drove Nevil out of town. He came back crushed 
 and broken to his old home, and sought refuge with 
 his old friends from the disgrace of his wrong. He 
 would not see any one but the doctor, outside of 
 their house; he was completely prostrated. The 
 worst of it was that he seemed really to have been 
 in love with the girl, whom he believed to have 
 been persuaded by her parents to break off the 
 match; though he could not understand why they 
 should have allowed her to go so far. Mrs. Faulk- 
 ner had her own opinions on this point, which she 
 expressed in her letter, and they were to the effect 
 that the girl was weak and fickle, but that she was 
 right in thinking she never had loved him, however 
 wrong she had been in once thinking differently. 
 This could not be suggested for Nevil's comfort, and 
 they were obliged tacitly to accept his theory of the 
 matter; he could not bear to think slightingly of 
 her. In fact, it had been a perfect infatuation, and 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 107 
 
 it had been all the more complete because Nevil, 
 though past thirty-five, had never been in love 
 before, and gave himself to his passion with the 
 ardour of an untouched heart, and the strength 
 of a manhood matured in the loftiest worship, 
 and the most childlike ignorance of women, and 
 especially girls. This was what Mrs. Faulkner 
 gathered at second-hand from his talk with her 
 mother-in-law ; and she found herself embarrassed 
 in deciding just how to treat the bruised and broken 
 man, so strangely cast upon their compassion. He 
 wanted to talk with her about his misery, but it 
 seemed to her that she ought not to let him ; and 
 yet she could not well avoid it, when he turned to 
 her with such a confident expectation of her sym- 
 pathy. It was very awkward having him in the 
 house ; but they could not turn him out of doors ; 
 and he clung to Douglas's mother with all the trust- 
 ing helplessness of a sick son. It was pathetic to 
 see a man who had once been to her the very em- 
 bodiment of strong common-sense and spiritual 
 manliness, so weak and helpless. The doctor said 
 he must get away as soon as he could ; and he had 
 better go to Europe and travel about. But Nevil 
 
10S THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 was poor; they could send him, of course, and 
 would be glad to do so ; but he was sensitive about 
 money, and had none of that innocent clerical will- 
 ingness to take it. 
 
 The letter closed rather abruptly with civil re- 
 membrances to me. 
 
 " Isn't it cruel, dear ? " my wife said pleadingly, 
 as if to forestall any ironical view I might be in- 
 clined to take of the case. 
 
 "Yes, it is cruel," I answered quite in earnest, 
 and we went on to talk it over in all the lights. 
 We said, what a strange thing it was, in the distri- 
 bution of sorrow and trouble, that this one should 
 receive blow after blow, all through life, and that 
 one go untouched from the beginning to the end. 
 Any man would have thought that Mrs. Faulkner 
 had certainly had her share of suffering in her 
 husband's sickness and death, without having this 
 calamity of his friend laid upon her; for in the 
 mystery of our human solidarity it was clear that 
 she must help him support it. But apparently God 
 did not think so ; or was existence all a miserable 
 chance, a series of stupid, blundering accidents 1 
 We could not believe that ; for our very souls' sake, 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 109 
 
 and for our own sanity we must not. We who were 
 nowhere when the foundations of the earth were 
 laid, and knew not who had laid the measures of it, 
 or stretched the line upon it, could only feel that 
 our little corner of cognition afforded no perspective 
 of the infinite plan ; and we left those others to 
 their place in it, not without commiseration, but 
 certainly without trying to account for what had 
 happened to them, or with any hope of ever offering 
 a justification of it. 
 
Y. 
 
 THE situation, which seemed to our despondent 
 philosophy tragically permanent, was of course only 
 a transitory phase ; and we quickly had news of a 
 change. Nevil had grown better ; he had been 
 invited to resume his former charge, with a year's 
 leave of absence for travel, and the complete re- 
 covery of his health. The sort of indignant tender- 
 ness with which all his old friends had taken up his 
 cause against his cruel fate had gone far to console 
 and restore him. Mrs. Faulkner spoke of his joy 
 in their affection as something very beautiful, and 
 she dwelt upon the pleasure it gave them to see the 
 old Nevil coming back day by day, in the old un- 
 selfish manliness. He had been troubled in his 
 depression by the consciousness that it was ignoble 
 to give way to it, and his courage was rising with 
 his strength to resist. But still it was thought best 
 for him to go abroad and complete his recovery by 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. Ill 
 
 an entire change ; and he was going very soon. He 
 had accepted the means from his people as an 
 advance of salary for services which he expected to 
 render, and so the obstacle of his poverty and pride 
 was got over. 
 
 I cannot say that it pleased us greatly to learn 
 that Nevil thought of sailing from Boston, and 
 hoped to see us ; but we had our curiosity to satisfy, 
 as well as our intangible obligation of hospitality to 
 fulfil, and my wife wrote asking him to our house 
 for such time as he should have between arriving 
 and departing. He was delayed in one way or other 
 so that he came in the morning, and sailed at noon ; 
 she did not meet him at all, but I went over to tfre 
 ship in East Boston, and saw him off, and then gave 
 her such report of him as I could. I am afraid it 
 was rather vague. I said he seemed shy, as if he 
 were embarrassed by his knowledge that I knew his 
 story ; he seemed a little cold ; he seemed a little 
 more clerical. I suppose I had really expected him 
 to speak with intense feeling of the Faulkners, and 
 that it disappointed me when he only mentioned 
 them in giving me the messages they had sent. I 
 do not know why I should have felt repelled, 
 
112 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 almost hurt by his manner ; but I dare say it 
 was because I had met him so full of a sympathy 
 which I could not express, and which he could not 
 recognise. I was aware afterward of having de- 
 rived my mood rather from Mrs. Faulkner's repre- 
 sentations of him than from my own recollections. 
 Perhaps I had a romantic wish to behold a man 
 whom the waters had passed over, and who gave 
 evidence of what he had undergone. But Nevil 
 appeared as he had always appeared to me : pure, 
 gentle, serene; not broken, not bruised, and by no 
 means prepared for the compassion which I was 
 prepared to lavish upon him. I did not reflect that 
 tfce intimacy had proceeded much more rapidly on 
 my part than on his. 
 
 He was in company with a wealthy parishioner, 
 and he presented me as a fellow- Westerner. His 
 friend ordered some champagne in celebration of 
 this fact and of the parting hour, and we had it in 
 their large state-room, the captain's room, which the 
 parishioner was very proud of having secured. He 
 filled Nevil's glass slowly, so that he should lose 
 nothing in mere effervescence, and said, "Doctor's 
 orders, you know." He explained to me that for 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 113 
 
 his own part he did not care about Europe ; he had 
 seen too much of it ; but he was going along to 
 watch out that Nevil took care of himself. 
 
 My wife was even less satisfied with this inter- 
 view at second-hand than I was at first-hand. She 
 insisted that I should search my conscience and say 
 whether I had not met Nevil with too great effusion, 
 which he might justly resent as patronising. I 
 brought myself in not guilty of this crime, and then 
 she said she had always thought he was tepid and 
 limited, and she was disposed to console herself by 
 finding in my rebuff, as she called it, a just punish- 
 ment for my having liked Nevil so much. "You 
 can see by that champagne business," she said, 
 " that, after all, he 's just as much a Westerner at 
 heart as Faulkner. I doubt if he was so much hurt 
 by that newspaper notoriety of his broken engage- 
 ment as he pretended to be." 
 
 I admitted that he was a fraud in every respect, 
 and that he had been guilty of something very like 
 larceny in depriving her of a hero. "But," I said, 
 "you have your heroine left." 
 
 " Yes, thank goodness ! She 's a woman / " 
 ' " A heroine usually is unless she 's an angel." 
 
 H 
 
114 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Nevil was gone a year, and during this time the 
 correspondence between Mrs. Faulkner and Mrs. 
 March, fevered to an abnormal activity by recent 
 events, fell back into the state of correspondence in 
 health which tends to an exchange of apologies for 
 not having written. Mrs. Faulkner's letters con- 
 tained some report of Nevil's movements : and we 
 had got so used to his being abroad that it seemed 
 very sudden when one came saying that he had got 
 home, perfectly well, and had gone at once to work 
 in his parish, with all his old energy. She sent 
 some newspapers with marked notices of him ; and 
 then it seemed to me that we heard nothing more 
 from her till the next spring, when a most joyful 
 letter burst upon us, as it were, with the announce- 
 ment of her engagement to Nevil. 
 
 I cannot say exactly what it was about this fact 
 that shocked us both. The affair, superficially, was 
 in every way right and proper. We were sure that 
 as Hermia reported Faulkner's mother was as happy 
 in it as herself, and that it was the just and lawful 
 recompense of suffering that Hermia and Nevil had 
 jointly and severally undergone for no wrong or 
 fault of theirs ; we ought to have been glad for 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 115 
 
 them; and yet, somehow, we could not; somehow 
 we were not reconciled to that comfortable close for 
 the most painful passage of life we had ever wit- 
 nessed. Instead of being the end of trouble, it 
 seemed like the beginning. It brought up agaiu 
 with dreadful vividness all the experiences of that 
 day when Faulkner died. It was as if he rose from 
 the dead, and walked the earth again in the agony of 
 body we had seen, and the anguish of mind we had 
 imagined. Once more I saw him, with a face full 
 of hate, push her from him, and fall back and gasp 
 and die. 
 
 Hermia's letter came in the morning ; and during 
 the forenoon I received a telegram at my office from 
 her asking if Dr. Wingate were in Boston. I sent 
 out and found that the doctor was at home, and 
 answered accordingly. Then I sent the telegram to 
 my wife, and hurried away from the office rather 
 early in the afternoon, to learn what she made of it. 
 
 She had just got a telegram herself from Mrs. 
 Faulkner, saying that she should start for Boston by 
 the eleven o'clock train that night, and asking if she 
 might come to our house. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE general change in Hermia, no less than a 
 phase of her character which had never before shown 
 itself to us, struck me at the station where I went 
 to meet her on the arrival of her train; and when I 
 brought her home, I saw that she affected my wife 
 in the same way. Personally we had known her 
 only as the submissive and patient subject of an 
 invalid's sick will, anxious to devote herself to the 
 gratification of his whims. We remembered her as 
 all gentleness, abeyance, self-effacement, and then as 
 a despair so quiet that the wildest grief would have 
 been less pathetic to witness. From Wingate's 
 report of her interview with him we had inferred a 
 strength which was rather hysterical; and though 
 her letters of the last two years had given us the 
 impression of a clear and just mind, able to decide 
 impartially from uncommon insight, we had still 
 kept our old idea of her, and thought only of the 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 117 
 
 self-abnegation we had seen, and the somewhat 
 abnormal self-assertion of which we had heard. 
 
 She now appeared younger than before, which I 
 suppose was an effect of her having really grown 
 thinner ; and with her return to her youthful figure 
 she had acquired an elastic vigour which we did not 
 perceive at once to be moral rather than physical. 
 It was when we fairly saw her face in the light of 
 the half-hour which we had with her before dinner 
 that we knew this was the spirit's school of the 
 body ; and that underneath her power over herself 
 was a weakness that had to be constantly watched 
 and disciplined. She was like an athlete who knows 
 the point in which lies the danger of his failure, and 
 who guards and fortifies it. I am aware that this 
 gives a false and theatrical complexion to the simple 
 truth that touched and fascinated us ; but I do not 
 know how otherwise to express it; and I am not 
 able to describe as I would like the appearance of a 
 great happiness suddenly arrested and held in check, 
 which we both believed we saw in her. It was this, 
 I fancy, that kept us silent with those congratula- 
 tions upon her engagement which we should both 
 have felt it fit to offer. To tell the whole truth, we 
 
118 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 were a little quelled and overawed by the resolute 
 strength of which she gave the effect, and we left it 
 for her, if she would, to enlarge the circle of our talk 
 from the commonplaces of her journey East, and her 
 ability to sleep on the cars, and of her health, and 
 Mrs. Faulkner's health, and ours; and include an 
 emotional region where Nevil should at least be 
 named. But she did not mention him, and she only 
 departed from these safe generalities in asking if we 
 could probably see Dr. Wingate that evening. 
 
 I said that he had no office hours in the evening, 
 out I knew he was to be found at home between 
 half-past seven and nine, and we might chance it. 
 
 " I must see him to-night," she answered quietly, 
 " and I wish you and Mrs. March would come with 
 me. It 's a matter that I may want you to know 
 about. I may need need " she faltered a breath 
 " your help." 
 
 " Why, of course," said my wife; and then I had 
 one of my inspirations, as she called them. 
 
 I said, " Why not send a messenger round for Dr. 
 Wingate to come here ? It will catch him at dinner, 
 and then we can make sure of him," and I modestly 
 evaded the merit I might have acquired through this 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 119 
 
 suggestion, by going off to ring for a messenger, who 
 arrived, of course, just when we had forgotten him, 
 and made my wife believe it was the doctor. 
 
 We had a moment together before dinner for the 
 exchange of impressions and conjectures, and I made 
 my little objections to the hardship of being involved 
 again in Mrs. Faulkner's affairs. "What do you 
 suppose she meant by needing our help ? Really I 
 think I must be excused from being present at her 
 consultation of Dr. Wingate ! If she 's going to 
 break down on our hands " 
 
 My wife saw the parody of her customary anxieties 
 in the presence of any aspect of the unexpected. 
 " Nonsense ! It 's nothing of that kind, poor thing ! 
 If it only were ! But it 's something that 's on her 
 mind that Dr. Wingate knows about and she 
 doesn't. And now the time 's come when she must." 
 
 " Do you mean the dream 1 " 
 
 " Yes. Or something connected with it. I saw 
 it in an instant. Well, she 's got her punishment ! " 
 
 " Her punishment ? What in the world is she 
 punished for 1 " 
 
 " For trying to bear more than she could. For 
 trying not to know what she must know before she 
 
120 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 could really ever take another step in life. I sup- 
 pose at that time she expected to die. But she 
 lived." 
 
 " Ah, that 's a mistake we often make ! " 
 
 " Yes, she could have borne it if nothing else had 
 happened after that." 
 
 "But something else happened." 
 
 "And now she has to provide for this world 
 instead of the next." 
 
 " Poor mortality ! " I sighed. " Between the two 
 worlds, how its difficulties are multiplied." 
 
VII. 
 
 DR. WINGATE arrived with his professional face, 
 in which I fancied a queer interrogation of mine. 
 Then I said, " It's Mrs. Faulkner who wishes to see 
 you. You remember 1 She 's here with us." 
 
 But he only asked, " How long has she been in 
 town ? " and he gave a poke or two at his hair after 
 taking his hat off in the hall, where I went out to 
 meet him when I heard his ring. 
 
 " Since four o'clock." 
 
 "Oh I" 
 
 " She was anxious to see you at once, and I made 
 bold to send for you, instead of taking the chance of 
 not finding you in." 
 
 "Oh, that's all right," he said, and he rubbed his 
 hands with an air of impatience which decided me 
 not to tell him, as I had imagined myself doing, of 
 her engagement to Nevil by way of preparation. I 
 
122 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 saw that it was not my affair ; and I decided riot to 
 put my fingers between the bark and the tree. 
 
 He preceded me into the library, where Mrs. 
 Faulkner sat waiting with my wife, and I saw him 
 make a special effort to temper his bluff directness 
 with a kindly deference. It was she who was 
 brusque, and who put aside the preliminaries which 
 he would have interposed. 
 
 " Doctor Wingate, I have come to Boston to see 
 you in the hope that you can help me. But now I 
 almost think that no one can help me. You can't 
 change the truth ! " 
 
 " Rather an undertaking, Mrs. Faulkner, I admit," 
 he said, with a smile for her exaltation. " But it 
 depends somewhat upon the nature of the truth. I 
 have known cases in which I could change the truth 
 back. They 're not so very uncommon." He looked 
 at her with smiling insinuation, and she smiled 
 pathetically in response. 
 
 " This isn't one of that kind," she said, and she 
 had to make the effort of beginning afresh. "Do 
 you remember when I came to you just just after 
 my husband's death ; and spoke to you about the 
 dream that killed him ? " 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 123 
 
 "The dream didn't kill him," said Wingate. 
 "But I remember the interview you refer to." He 
 looked round at my wife and me, and then at 
 Hermia, as if to question whether it was really her 
 intention that we should be present, and we both 
 made an instinctive motion to rise. 
 
 " Don't go," she said. " I wish you to stay. I 
 was afraid, then, to face it alone, and now I wish to 
 know what it was. Oh yes ! I made a feint of 
 refusing to know it for his sake. I believed that I 
 was sincere, but I was a miserable hypocrite. I was 
 sparing myself, not him. Now, all that must come 
 to an end. I ask you to tell me what his dream 
 was, and to tell it in the presence of those who saw 
 him suffer from it, die of it." Wingate opened his 
 mouth to protest again, but she hurried on. " You 
 said then that his dream concerned me, and I want 
 them to judge me by it, and I will judge myself by 
 their judgment." 
 
 " Keally, Mrs. Faulkner," said Wingate, with the 
 laugh of a man whose perplexity passes any other 
 expression, " you are almost as bad as he was ! 
 Where shall I begin ? How much can you bear ? 
 The whole thing 'a very painful ! Why must you 
 
124 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 know it now, when you've held out against it so 
 bravely, so wisely, for two years ? " 
 
 " Because," she answered, as if she had prepared 
 herself for some such question, " I was going to take 
 a great step, and I wished to look at every thought 
 and fact of my life, to be sure that I was worthy to 
 take such a step. I got to thinking of that dream, 
 which you said concerned me ; and I found that I 
 could have no peace, no certainty of the kind I 
 wanted till I knew what it was. I must have been 
 there must have been something in me terribly 
 wrong, terribly bad, to have inspired such a dream, 
 and " 
 
 "Ah-h-h!" the doctor broke out, "you're as 
 wild as he was in that reasoning," and to both of us 
 men her logic was pitiably childlike; but I could 
 see that for my wife it had a force inappreciable to 
 us, because she was a woman too ; no doubt she 
 would judge Hermia as severely as she judged her- 
 self. "What you say," the doctor went on, "is 
 perfectly monstrous, and I should not feel justified 
 in telling you anything about it, unless I could 
 bring you to see the matter in a reasonable light. 
 And, in the first place, I want you to realise that 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 1 25 
 
 whatever you were, or whatever you were not, it had 
 absolutely no more to do with his dream, than the 
 character of an inhabitant of Saturn, if there is one. 
 Why, just consider ! You wish to judge yourself, 
 and if possible condemn yourself I can see that ! 
 for something he dreamed about you ; and yet I sup- 
 pose you dream things about others we all do ! 
 that dishonour and defame them, without thinking 
 evil of them for it ? " 
 
 I laughed. "Why, of course!" but the two 
 women were silent. 
 
 My wife said finally, " Why, of course, we don't 
 blame them for it ; but we can't feel exactly the 
 same toward them afterward ; and if I knew that 
 a person had such a dream about me, I should not 
 be comfortable till till " 
 
 " Till you knew just why they had it," I sug- 
 gested ; and I tried to lighten the situation with 
 another laugh. 
 
 Hermia gave my wife a grateful look for her sym- 
 pathy, quite as if it had eased her of her self-accusal, 
 instead of darkening her case against herself, and 
 asked the doctor, " Did his dream dishonour me 
 defame me to you ? " 
 
126 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " No ! " the doctor cried out. " I did not say 
 that. His dream concerned you, and it distressed 
 him j but I couldn't say that it was one to make me 
 or any one think wrong of you. Now, won't that 
 do ! Isn't that enough ? " 
 
 "No," said Hermia, "it isn't enough. I must be 
 judge of whether I was guilty of anything wrong, 
 and I must know what his dream accused me of. 
 Why did it keep coming and coming ? " 
 
 " How do you know it kept coming and com- 
 ing?" 
 
 "Because I know. Because because His 
 
 mother and I were looking over some things he had 
 left I wished to do it letters and papers ; and we 
 found a scrap that said that said that spoke of 
 his having a dream, and how he had been dreaming 
 the same thing for months, sometimes every night, 
 sometimes once a week. And I can remember how 
 he would be very good to me for days, and then 
 some morning he would not speak to me or hardly 
 look at me ; so that so that I was afraid his 
 mind " 
 
 "Did you keep that scrap?" "VVingate inter- 
 rupted. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 1 27 
 
 Hermia took it out of her pocket where she must 
 have been keeping her hand upon it, and gave it 
 him. He read it over, glanced again at the charac- 
 ters, and handed it back to her. 
 
 "If you needed any proof of what I must say to 
 you now, Mrs. Faulkner," he began very gravely 
 and tenderly, " you could get it of the first alienist 
 Avhom you ghowed that paper. I suppose, if you 've 
 been brooding over this matter, it will be a relief, 
 a help to know that your fears were right. When 
 your husband wrote that paper he was not in his 
 right mind. The signs are simply unmistakable; 
 they couldn't be counterfeited ; there 's insanity in 
 every line, in every word of that handwriting. It 
 would be interesting to know whether his hand was 
 the same when he wrote of other things. But that's 
 irrelevant. What 's certain is that on one point he 
 had a delusion, and that this delusion had begun to 
 show itself in the form of a dream. Isn't it enough, 
 now, if I assure you that his dream had no more 
 real significance, no more rightful implication, than 
 any other form of mania 1 " 
 
 She shook her head. "No. Why should it per- 
 sist ? " 
 
128 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " Ha-a-a ! " he breathed in desperation. " Why 
 should any mania persist in a disordered mind 1 " 
 
 " It isn't the same thing at all." 
 
 " But it is exactly and perfectly the same thing ! 
 It was the presence in his sleep of a maniacal de- 
 lusion that was gradually overshadowing his waking 
 consciousness, and that must have ended in his open 
 insanity if death had not come to his relief." 
 
 She simply asked, " What was it 1 " 
 
 " What was it 1 " he echoed. " Well, you have a 
 sort of right to know ; perhaps you had better know. 
 But I wish I wish you had the strength to forego 
 it to accept my assurance, the most solemn, the 
 most sincere I could give any one on a matter of 
 life and death, that although his dream involved 
 you, it no mcvre rightfully inculpated you than it in- 
 culpated me, and that it ought to have no more con- 
 sideration, no more influence, in your life than the 
 ravings of any lunatic that came to you from an 
 asylum window as you passed in the street. Now, 
 won't that do ? Can't you accept my assurance, 
 and go home satisfied ? " 
 
 " When I know what his dream was," she answered. 
 "I can never rest again, now, till I know it." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 129 
 
 "But there is this to be considered, Mrs. Faulk- 
 ner," he urged. "There is the regard you have 
 for him, his memory. He was no more responsible 
 for dreaming his dream than you are for having 
 been the subject of it. But you know how involun- 
 tary, how helpless, we often are in our judgments 
 of others and I warn you it 's my duty to warn 
 you that the danger is not that you may not be 
 able to forgive yourself, but that you may not be 
 able to forgive him." 
 
 "I must take the risk of that. I must know 
 everything, now, at any cost. I am not afraid of 
 being unjust to him. I saw him suffer, and I can 
 make every allowance." Wingate was silent, with 
 liis head down, and she began with a kind of gasp, 
 " Did he was he afraid of me ? I know how 
 suspicious people are who are affected as you say he 
 was beginning to be though I can't believe it, I 
 can't imagine it ! and I can understand, if he was I 
 Did he think I would hurt him, somehow ? Was 
 that what he dreamed ? Did he dream that I was 
 going to do him some harm kill him 1 " 
 
 " Oh, no ! no ! no 1 " cried Wingate, getting to his 
 feet. " Nothing of that kind, I assure you ! " He 
 I 
 
1 30 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 spoke with the relief, as I fancied, of having found 
 out the worst she had feared, and of being able to 
 console her with something indefinitely less terrible. 
 I had often known my wife push out a skirmish 
 line of apprehension far beyond the main body of 
 her anxiety, so as to have the comfort of finding 
 herself within the utmost she had imagined of evil \ 
 and I understood the feminine principle on which 
 Wingate counted, and shared his relief. 
 
 " Then what was it ? " Hermia asked. 
 
 " What was it ? Nothing. Nothing at all, in a 
 manner ! Nothing of the kind you feared. But if 
 you must know," Wingate glanced at us where we 
 sat spellbound by our sympathy and interest, 
 "though it's ridiculously unimportant in compari- 
 son with what you've suggested, I think perhaps 
 you 'd better hear it alone, Mrs. Faulkner." 
 
 " By all manner of means ! " I said ; and my wife 
 said, " Yes, indeed ! " as we rose together. 
 
 I felt from the first an odious quality in the part 
 we had been obliged to bear ; and I confess that I 
 was beginning to bear it with some measure of re- 
 sentment, in spite of my curiosity, and with some 
 misgiving as to the delicacy of the woman who had 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 131 
 
 required our presence at this interview. But per- 
 haps I judged her too severely. In some of the 
 most intimate affairs and sentiments, in which 
 women are conventionally supposed to play a veiled 
 and hidden part, they really have an overt, almost 
 a public role, which nature no doubt fits them to 
 sustain, without violence to their modesty, without 
 touching susceptibilities that in men would be 
 intolerably wounded. 
 
 I was impatient of the mechanical effort Hermia 
 made to detain my wife, to whose hand she clung, 
 and whom I had to draw from her with me out of 
 the room. My wife agreed with me that we must 
 have gone, but I doubt if she perfectly thought so ; 
 and they both had an effect of yielding out of 
 regard to the sensibilities of us men. 
 
VIII. 
 
 I WAS in no humour to tempt any confidence from 
 Wingate when I hurried out to the street door to 
 see him off after I heard him come out of the library. 
 My curiosity, such as I had, was damped by a sense 
 of the indecency of knowing in brutal vocables what 
 I already conjectured, and I was still resentful of 
 having been obliged to enter into the affair to the 
 extent 1 had. 
 
 Wingate let me help him on with his overcoat, 
 and he put his hand on the door-knob before he 
 spoke : " The next time you have a case of this kind, 
 old fellow, I hope I shall be in Europe." He looked 
 hot and dry, and he breathed harder than even a 
 stout man need after being helped on with his over- 
 coat. " I made a mistake in sending your wife and 
 you out of the room. It was no easier for me, and 
 Mrs. Faulkner says she shall tell her at once, any- 
 way, and you might as well have had it at first-hand. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 133 
 
 She takes it worse than I expected. Good night ! " 
 lie added abruptly, after a pause, and an evident 
 intention to say something else ; and he flung him- 
 self down my steps and seemed to rebound into his 
 coupe, which was standing before them. 
 
 I waited the next turn of events with an increasing 
 sense of injury at the hands of our guest, for I knew 
 that ultimately I must be drawn upon for the ner- 
 vous force which my wife would spend in sympathis- 
 ing with her; and I had not yet recognised the 
 claim that she seemed to think our purely accidental 
 relations had established for her upon us. 
 
 But the next turn of events was apparently to 
 wait our motion. I mechanically expected Hermia 
 to come out of the library where I was mechanically 
 impatient to take my book and pity her at my ease ; 
 but she did not come out, and I had to go and sit 
 down in the parlour, which was less commodious for 
 my compassion, and unusual for my book. I sat 
 there, disconsolately trying to read, for what I 
 thought a long time, till my wife came downstairs. 
 
 " Where is Mrs. Faulkner ?" she asked, under her 
 breath. I nodded toward the library. "But I 
 thought the doctor had gone ] " 
 
134 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " So he has. He went some time ago ; but he 
 didn't take her with him." 
 
 " I Ve been expecting her to ask for me," said my 
 wife vaguely. " I hated to go to her. It would 
 have seemed like prying." 
 
 " To a lady who was willing to have the whole 
 matter, whatever it was, talked out before us both ? 
 
 " That is true," said my wife. " Would you 
 knock?" 
 
 "Perhaps I would listen at the key-hole first," 
 said I, and I felt myself growing more and more 
 sardonic, for no reason, except that I had such a 
 good chance. 
 
 My wife meekly went and listened, and then, 
 after a look at me, opened the library door and went 
 in. It was nearly an hour before she rejoined me 
 in our own room, having first gone with our guest 
 to hers, and stayed with her there a little while. 
 
 Then she said, " Well, Basil, I never knew any- 
 thing so sad in my life. I don't know what we are 
 going to do. She must go home at once, and I 
 don't see how she is ever to get there. That is what 
 we have got to talk over now." 
 
 "I supposed you had talked it over already," I 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 135 
 
 suggested, still perversely affecting that cheap cyni- 
 cism. 
 
 My wife took it for what it was, and ignored it. 
 
 " Poor stricken creature!" she sighed. "I don't 
 believe she had moved after the doctor left her till I 
 came in, and then she hardly moved. She had that 
 awful stony quiet that people strong people have, 
 when you bring them bad news. I could hardly get 
 her to speak. She said she wanted me to know 
 everything, but she did not know how to tell me, 
 unless I asked her ; and so little by little, we got it 
 out together. But I think I 'd better not tell you, 
 dear, just in so many words, till she 's out of the 
 house ; do you ? " 
 
 " No ; I guess I know pretty well what you have 
 to tell," I answered, honestly enough, and without 
 any ironical slant, even in my tone. 
 
 My wife went on. "I'm afraid Dr. Wingate 
 didn't manage very well : he had something finer 
 than nerves to deal with. But I don't blame him, 
 poor man, either. He was thrown off his guard by 
 her asking if her husband had dreamed that she was 
 going to hurt him, and he thought that what lie 
 really did dream was so much less dreadful that it 
 
136 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 would relieve her ; and 1 'm afraid he went at it too 
 lightly. But it seems that she had never imagined 
 that he could have dreamed that, and it perfectly 
 crushed her. Basil ! Don't you believe there are 
 some natures so innocent that they have no suspicion 
 of suspicion, that they can't conceive of it ? Well, 
 that is Hermia Faulkner ! She is on such a grand 
 scale, she 5 s so noble and faithful and loyal, that she 
 can't even understand the kind of nature that could 
 attribute wrong to her: its baseness, its cruelty. 
 She's crushed under the ruin of her own ideal of 
 that wretched man ! " 
 
 " Oh, oh, oh ! " I cried. " Isn't that rather a high 
 horse you 're on ? I don't think poor old Faulkner 
 was to blame for his crazy dream. I wouldn't like 
 to shoulder the responsibility for my dreams !" 
 
 " You are very different. You are good" said my 
 wife, " and you couldn't have such a dream, if you 
 tried ; but if you go, now, and think it was worse 
 than it really was, I shall hate you. I should like to 
 tell you just what it was : but you are such a fool, 
 dear," she added tenderly, " that you 'd be conscious 
 the whole way, and couldn't help showing it every 
 minute." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 137 
 
 " The whole way 1 Every minute ? What do 
 you mean 1 " 
 
 " I Ve decided that you must take Hermia 
 home." 
 
 " Oh, I see ! That was why you were so willing 
 we should inquire how she could get there. But 
 supposing I can't leave my business 1 " 
 
 " But I know you can. You were going to New 
 York with me, next week, and we can give that up. 
 There 's nothing else for it. We must ! It will give 
 you a chance to see your old friends out there, and 
 you've simply got to do it; that's all." She added 
 in terms expressive of the only phase of her anxiety 
 that could be put concretely, and by no means re- 
 presentative of her entire motive. "I can't have 
 her getting sick here on my hands ; and there 's no 
 other way. Her mother-in-law is too old to come 
 for her, and " 
 
 " We might telegraph the Reverend James Nevil 
 to come," I suggested. 
 
 " Basil ! " cried my wife. 
 
 " Oh, it 's no use, my dear ! I 'd better know just 
 what I 'm to be conscious of." 
 
 " You know it already ; we Ve both known it from 
 
138 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 the beginning; but I can't tell you. It isn't her 
 fault, though it covers her with such cruel shame 
 that she can't look herself in the face. It 's his fault 
 for having him there to dream about ; and it 's HIS 
 fault for being there to be dreamt about." I knew 
 that my wife meant Faulkner by her less, and Nevil 
 by her greater, vehemence of accent. " I suppose 
 she felt, all the time such a woman would that 
 he had no right to bring his friendship into their 
 married life that way. She must have felt ham- 
 pered and molested by it ; but she yielded to him 
 because- she didn't want to seem petty or jealous. 
 There 's where I blame her. Basil ! A woman's 
 jealousy is God-given ! It 's inspired, for her safety 
 and for her husband's. She ought to show it." 
 
 " How about a man's 1 " 
 
 " Oh, that 's different ! Men have no inspirations. 
 Jealousy 's a low brutal instinct with them. Just see 
 the difference between her feeling that his friend had 
 no business in their family, and his making that very 
 friend the object of his suspicions ! " 
 
 "If you conjecture one fact," I said, "and hold 
 Faulkner responsible for the other, the difference is 
 certainly very much against him. But, as I under- 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 139 
 
 stand from Dr. Wingate, Faulkner's dream fore- 
 shadowed his alienation." 
 
 " Oh, don't talk to me of Dr. Wingate ! " she cried. 
 " He doesn't know anything about it. No ! It was 
 his miserable jealousy that turned his brain ; it wasn't 
 his insanity that caused his jealousy ; and if you 
 keep saying that, Basil, I shall think you are trying 
 to justify him." 
 
 " Bless my soul ! What question of justification 
 is there 1 " 
 
 " If he was not responsible for his dream," she 
 went on, " he was certainly, responsible for the occa- 
 sion of his dream, and so it comes to the same thing 
 at last. It was his folly, his silly, romantic clinging 
 to a sentiment that he ought to have flung away the 
 instant he was married, which did all the harm. A 
 husband shouldn't have any friend but his wife." 
 
 " You will never get me to deny that, my dear, at 
 least as long as you 're in this dangerous humour." 
 
 "I know I'm ridiculous," she said nervously. 
 " But I do feel so sorry for that poor creature ! She 
 seems to me like some innocent thing caught in a 
 -trap ; and she can't escape, and no one can set her 
 free. I shall begin to believe that there is such a 
 
140 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 thing as Fate, in that old Greek sense : something 
 that punishes you for your sorrows and for the 
 errors of others." 
 
 " There is certainly something that does that," I 
 said, " whether we call it Fate or not. We suffer 
 every day for our sorrows, and for the sins of men 
 we never saw or even heard of. There 's solidarity 
 in that direction, anyway." 
 
 " Yes, and why can't we feel it in the other direc- 
 tion ? Why can't we feel that we 're helped, as well 
 as hurt by those unknown people 1 Why aren't we 
 rewarded for our happiness ? " 
 
 " It 's all a mystery ; and I don't know but we are 
 rewarded for our happiness, quite as much as we 're 
 punished for our misery. Some utterly forgotten 
 ancestral dyspeptic rises from the dust now and 
 then, and smites me with his prehistoric indiges- 
 tion. Well, perhaps it 's some other forgotten an- 
 cestor, whose motions were all hale and joyous, that 
 makes me get up now and then impersonally gay 
 and happy, and go through the day as if I had just 
 come into a blessed immortality." 
 
 " Ah, those awful dead ! Basil," she entreated, 
 ". from this time on, let 's live so that whichever dies 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 141 
 
 first, the other won't have anything to be remorse- 
 ful for ! " 
 
 " We can't do that, and I don't believe we were 
 meant to do it. We have to live together as if we 
 were going to live together for ever." 
 
 " Why, we are, dearest ! Don't you think we 
 are 1 " 
 
 " I can't imagine anything else ; but I don't under- 
 stand that this is the prospect that now looks so dis- 
 heartening for Mrs. Faulkner. If it were a question 
 of her going on for ever with Faulkner, it would be 
 very simple, or comparatively simple. In that case 
 the wrong he had helplessly done her in his crazy 
 dream would only endear him to her the more, for 
 it would be something for her perpetually to exer- 
 cise her love of forgiving upon. But the difficulty 
 is that she now wishes to go on living for ever with 
 somebody else. I don't blame her for that ; on the 
 contrary I think it's altogether well and wholly 
 right, something to be desired and praised. But if 
 the one she now wishes to go on living with for ever 
 happens to be the very person whom her dead 
 husband's dream foreboded " 
 
 "Basil!" 
 
142 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM, 
 
 "Why, you see, it complicates the affair." We 
 had touched the quick, and we were silent a 
 moment, quivering with sympathy. "It's all a 
 mystery, and one part no more a mystery than 
 another; but I suppose that when we come really 
 to know, it will all be so very, very simple that we 
 shall be astonished. Mrs. Faulkner's trouble isn't 
 about the future, though; that has to be left to 
 take care of itself ; her trouble is about the present 
 and about the past. I haven't the least idea that 
 she ever gave a thought to Nevil as long as her 
 husband lived, or for long after he died." 
 
 " Basil ! I like to hear you say that ! " 
 
 "I dare say you'd like to say it yourself: it's 
 very magnanimous. But I can understand how 
 such a woman would now begin to question whether 
 she had not thought of him, and would end by 
 bringing herself in guilty, no matter what the facts 
 were. I didn't like her attempting to ignore the 
 tenor of Faulkner's dream when she went to talk 
 with Wingate about it immediately after his death. 
 That was romantic." 
 
 " I didn't like that either," said my wife. "Yes, 
 it was romantic." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM, 143 
 
 " If she had made Wingate tell her then, it would 
 have been all over with by this time. Either she 
 would have resented it, and set about forgetting 
 Faulkner, and living a denial of all fealty to the 
 memory of a man who could wrong her so " 
 
 "Basil ! You said he was not responsible for it ! " 
 
 " Or else she would have succumbed to it, and re- 
 fused ever to see Nevil, and this frightful quandary 
 that she 's got us all into never would have been 
 brought about." 
 
 My wife could not laugh with me at our personal 
 entanglement in Mrs. Faulkner's affair, which my 
 words reminded her of. She began to enlarge upon 
 the hardship of it ; and she was not reconciled to 
 it by my arguments going to show how nothing 
 any one did or suffered could be done or suffered to 
 one's-self alone, and that probably at that very 
 moment some nameless savage in Central Africa was 
 shaping our destiny in some degree and was making 
 favour with his fetich for our disaster, when he 
 supposed himself to be merely invoking protection 
 against a raid of Arab slavers. Those were the days 
 of frequent railway accidents, and she recurred to 
 her fixed principle that I must never go a railroad 
 
144 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 journey alone, because it was necessary that when I 
 was killed on the train she and the children must be 
 there to be killed with me. Nothing less than the 
 infatuation she had for Mrs. Faulkner would have 
 supported her in the sacrifice of such a principle, 
 and I am not sure that even that would have 
 been enough without the lively fear of having Mrs. 
 Faulkner break down with a nervous fever, or some- 
 thing, before we could get her out of the house. 
 I recurred to this consideration, which Isabel had 
 already touched upon, and treated it in a philo- 
 sophic spirit, as an instance of the grotesque and 
 squalid element which is so apt to mar a heroic 
 situation, in order apparently to keep human nature 
 modest; but she could not follow me. She said, 
 yes, that decided it ; and she drew a sigh of relief, 
 which she cut short to express her wonder that Dr. 
 Wingate should have told Hermia what Faulkner's 
 dream was when he knew it would perfectly kill 
 her. She said she had long had her doubts of his 
 wisdom, and she now proceeded to disable it, with 
 that confidence in her ability to judge him which all 
 women feel in regard to physicians. At least, she 
 said, if he had any sort of intuition, or even the 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 145 
 
 smallest grain of common-sense, or the slightest 
 delicacy, he would not have told her that the man 
 whom the dream involved was the very man she 
 was going to marry. I said that perhaps Wingate 
 did not know she was going to marry Nevil ; and 
 she acknowledged that this was true, and began to 
 rehabilitate him. I was in hopes that she would 
 not ask me why I had not told him ; for I now saw, 
 or thought I saw, that I had been mistaken in the 
 delicacy which had kept me from doing it. But I 
 was not to escape : the question came, in due course, 
 and all my struggles to free myself only served to 
 fix the blame for the whole trouble more firmly 
 upon me. She said that now she saw it all ; and 
 that I need not go to Central Africa for the cause of 
 our predicament. 
 
 I spent a troubled night, tormented, whether 
 sleeping or waking, by a fantastic exaggeration of 
 the whole business, and exasperated by a keen sense 
 of its preposterousness. It seemed to me intoler- 
 able that I should be made the victim of it : that 
 this gossamer nothing, which might perhaps account- 
 ably involve the lives of those concerned through a 
 morbid conscience, should have power upon me, to 
 K 
 
146 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 drag me a thousand miles away from my family, 
 and subject me to all the chances of danger and 
 death which I must incur, seemed to me atrocious. 
 I spent myself in long imaginary dialogues with my 
 wife, with Hermia, with Nevil, in which I convinced 
 them to no effect that I had nothing whatever to 
 do with the matter, and would not have. Faulkner 
 appeared to me a demoniac presence, at the end of 
 the lurid perspective, running back to that scene in 
 the garden implacable, immovable, ridiculous like 
 all the rest, monstrous, illogical, and no more to be 
 reasoned away than to be entreated. 
 
 I woke in the morning with the clear sense that 
 there was only one thing for it, and that was simply 
 to refuse to go with Mrs. Faulkner. I spent the 
 forenoon in arranging my business for a week's 
 absence, and I started West with her on the three 
 o'clock train. 
 
PART THIRD. NEVIL. 
 
 IN spite of my wife's care that I should not be 
 made conscious in Mrs. Faulkner's presence by 
 knowing just the terms of her husband's dream, I 
 must have been rather embarrassed in setting off 
 upon her homeward journey with her if she had 
 seemed aware of any strangeness in it. But she 
 seemed aware of nothing. I could not help seeing 
 that my company, or the supervision of some one, 
 was essential to her. She was like a person men- 
 tally benumbed ; all the currents of her thought 
 were turned so deeply inward, toward the one 
 trouble which engrossed them, that she appeared 
 incapable of motion from herself. She did what I 
 bade her with a mute passivity, as if she were my 
 mesmeric subject, and with a sort of unseeing stare, 
 like a sleep-walker's. My wife came with us to the 
 station to take leave of her, but Hermia had parted 
 
148 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 with her at the moment of being left alone with 
 Dr. Wingate the night before, and I think could not 
 have been fully sensible of any of us since. I had a 
 fantastic notion of being like something in a dream 
 to her, and I am afraid I must have been like some- 
 thing very harassing, with the attentions I was 
 obliged to offer her. 
 
 I tried to make them as few as possible, and to 
 confine them to the elemental questions of eating 
 and sleeping. These were very simply settled ; she 
 neither ate nor slept throughout the journey. I 
 spent all the time I could in the smoking car ; when 
 I came to her with the announcement that at this or 
 that next station we were to have five, or ten, or 
 twenty minutes for refreshment, after the barbarous 
 custom of the days before dining-cars, she said she 
 wanted nothing, so definitively that I could not urge 
 her; and in the morning, after my nightmares in 
 my berth, I found her sitting in one corner of the 
 section I had secured for her, with every appearance 
 of not having moved from her place since she first 
 took it on coming aboard the car. Her cheek was 
 propped on the palm of one hand, and she had that 
 blind, straightforward stare. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 149 
 
 It was a strange journey ; and if our fellow- 
 passengers made their conjectures about us, it must 
 have been to the effect that I was in charge of a 
 mild case of melancholia, and was rather negligent 
 of my charge. I left her as much to herself as 
 I could, for I understood with what a painful strain 
 she would have to detach herself from the trouble 
 on which her thoughts were bent, if I interrupted 
 them, and that I could in no manner relieve her, or 
 help her to puzzle it out. Toward the end of the 
 second afternoon we came to one of the last stations 
 between us and our destination, and then she started 
 up with a long sigh, and after a moment began to 
 put together the little bags and wraps which women 
 travel with. 
 
 " Here we are at Blue Clay," I said, coming up to 
 her. 
 
 " Yes," she answered, " this is the last stop the 
 express makes before we get home." 
 
 Probably she had taken note of every point and 
 incident in the journey with that superficial con- 
 sciousness which is so active in times of trouble. 
 She now showed an alertness like that of one 
 awakened from a refreshing sleep, and I had an in- 
 
150 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 creasing sense of her having cast off the burden that 
 had oppressed her. There was nothing of levity in 
 her apparent relief ; her exaltation was noble and 
 dignified as her dejection had been. Perhaps she 
 had not reached any solution of her trouble ; per- 
 haps she had simply cast it from her by a natural 
 reaction as we do when we have suffered enough, 
 for one time, and was destined to take it up again. 
 But I felt that I could not be mistaken in the fact 
 of her relief. If I was mistaken, then it was because 
 she had a strength to conceal her suffering which I 
 could not imagine because she had so frankly shown 
 her suffering before. Her present behaviour might 
 have been a woman's ideal of the way she would 
 wish to behave in the circumstances; but I still 
 think Hermia Faulkner had found freedom, at that 
 moment, from the stress of her preoccupation, and 
 began to assume a certain hospitality of manner 
 toward me, because she was able without pain to do 
 so. She thanked me with ingenuous sweetness for 
 coming home with her, and expressed a sense of the 
 sacrifice which would have satisfied even the exact- 
 ing woman who had made me make it. She asked if 
 J had slept well, as if I had just got up ; and she 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 151 
 
 hoped I would not suffer by the great kindness 
 which Mrs. March and I had both shown her, and 
 which she would never forget. I protested, of 
 course, that it was all nothing, and said that I had 
 long wished to revisit the scenes of my youth, and 
 had eagerly seized the excuse that the hope of being 
 useful to her gave me for coming now. She an- 
 swered, " Yes ; that is what Mrs. March told me." 
 As we drew near our destination she sympathised 
 with the interest I felt in approaching the place 
 where I had spent the happiest years of my young 
 manhood, and helped me to make out some of the 
 landmarks by which I hoped to identify the city I 
 remembered. But the new city was built all out 
 over and beyond them, and our approach was hurried 
 by finding them within it, so that before I realised 
 it the train was slowing up in the grandiose dep6t 
 of vaulted brick and glass which replaced the shabby 
 wooden shed of former days. I had intended to 
 renew there the emotions with which I parted from 
 a friend long since dead, the night I started for 
 Europe; but I was distracted by the change, as 
 well as by the hurly-burly of arrival, and I willingly 
 abandoned myself to the friendly care of the black 
 
152 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 serving-man of Mrs. Faulkner who was there to 
 meet us, and who at once breveted me one of the 
 family. He took my bag, and led the way out to 
 Mrs. Faulkner's carriage, and put it in with her 
 things before I thought to stop him. 
 
 " Oh, I can't let you take the trouble of driving 
 me to a hotel," I said. " I will get a hack here." 
 
 " Why, surely," she answered, in a tone of wounded 
 expectation, you are coming to us 1 " 
 
 "No; I shall be here such a little while, 
 and " 
 
 " But that 's all the more reason why you should 
 be our guest. My mother would be hurt if you 
 went anywhere else ; we will leave you free to come 
 and go as you like ; only you must stay with us." 
 
 It was useless to protest, and I got into the car- 
 riage with her. 
 
II. 
 
 BOTH then and afterward, when we reached the 
 Faulkner mansion, I was aware of not having done 
 the Faulkners justice as personages, in our meeting 
 at Swampscott. I had understood, in a careless 
 way, that their occupation of that villa and the 
 style of their living in it meant money ; but Faulk- 
 ner himself was such an informal sloven, and Her- 
 mia was so little attributable in character to anything 
 about her, and the doom hanging over them was so 
 exclusive of all other interest in them, that I had 
 not conjectured the degree of state from which they 
 were detached. The quiet richness of the equipage 
 that had met us now was the forerunner of a sumptu- 
 ous comfort, far beyond any expectation of mine, in 
 all Mrs. Faulkner's belongings and surroundings. 
 She was not a person you could imagine caring for 
 the evidences or uses of wealth; she affected you 
 at once as exterior to all such sordid accidents ; as 
 
154 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 capable of being a goddess in any gown. As a 
 matter of fact, however, the costliness in which her 
 whole life was clad was certainly very great. 
 
 I had forgotten the spacious grounds in which 
 Faulkner's house stood, or perhaps I now noticed 
 them more because all the neighbourhood had been 
 closely built up in the process of the city's growth. 
 In the heart of the town the mansion rose from the 
 midst of ample lawns and gardens, enclosed by a high 
 brick wall, such as I had always said was my ideal 
 of stately bounds ; and it all looked much older than 
 anything at the East, from the soft-coal smoke with 
 which wall and mansion and garden trees were 
 blackened. I suppose it was the smell of this in the 
 air, and the mat of ivy on the house front, that con- 
 fused my memories of the farther past with more 
 recent recollections of England, and imparted to my 
 present sensations the vagueness of both, as we 
 rolled up under the porte coclikre. I saw that the 
 house must have been vastly enlarged since I had 
 been there last, and the bulk of the elms that over- 
 topped it, and the height of the slim white birches 
 on the lawn before it, warned me how long ago that 
 had been. Within, I was met by the fresh, brisk 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 155 
 
 warmth of a fire of hickory limbs, that burnt on 
 the wide hall hearth, and I at once delivered myself 
 up to the caresses of the velvety ease in which all life 
 moved there. These influences are so subtly corrupt- 
 ing that a vulgar question formed itself in my mind, 
 as I followed the servant up the broad staircase to 
 my room, and I wondered how much the invitation 
 of such luxury might tempt a man fagged in heart 
 and mind. I said to myself that if I were Nevil, for 
 example, and I were in love with the heart of this 
 material bliss, I should certainly let no fantastic 
 scruple bar me from possession. I cannot exactly 
 say how the formulation of this low thought 
 affected me with a perception of Hermia's charm 
 in a way it was not apt to make its appeal. But 
 when I went down to dinner, and met her again, 
 mellowed to harmony with all that softness and rich- 
 ness by a dress that lent itself in colour and texture 
 to her peculiar beauty, I was abashed by her youth 
 and loveliness. I had till then thought of her so 
 much as a mysteriously stricken soul, that I had 
 never done justice to her as a woman that some 
 favoured man might be in love with, as men are 
 with women, and might marry. When I now 
 
156 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 realised this I was ashamed of realising it, and was 
 afraid of betraying it somehow, by some levity, some 
 want of conformity in mood or manner to what I 
 knew of her. I suffered myself to wonder if Nevil 
 ever had this unruly sense of her, against which 
 something sadly reproachful in her beauty itself 
 seemed to protest, and which I feel that I have given 
 undue import and fixity in putting it into words. 
 I suppose it was all from seeing her for the first 
 time in colours, and from perceiving with a distinct- 
 ness unfelt before that she was in the perfect 
 splendor of a most regal womanhood. Something 
 perversely comic mixed with my remorse, when I 
 met her eye with these thoughts in my mind, and 
 fancied a swift query there as to the impression I 
 had of her. I wished to tease, to mystify her, to 
 keep her between laughing and crying, as a naughty 
 boy will with some little girl whom he pretends to 
 have found something wrong about. I have since 
 thought she may have been questioning whether I 
 read in her costume any conclusion as to the matter 
 pending in her mind ; and that she meant to express 
 by this assertion of her right to be beautiful the 
 decision which she had reached. If this was so, she 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 157 
 
 had chosen a means too finely, too purely feminine ; 
 my wife might have understood her, but I certainly 
 did not. 
 
 The dowager Mrs. Faulkner was there with her 
 in the drawing-room, a plain old lady, whom I could 
 see her son had looked like, in a rich old lady's silk. 
 She welcomed me with a motherly cordiality, and 
 put me on that footing of intimacy with Faulkner in 
 the past which I was always wishing in vain to 
 refuse. I perceived that I had for her only the 
 personality that he had given me; she could not 
 detach me from the period of my first acquaintance 
 with him. She began at once to talk literature with 
 me, as if that were the practical interest of my life ; 
 and I found her far better read, and of a far more 
 modern taste, than her son had been. She was one 
 of those old ladies who perhaps reach their perfec- 
 tion a little away from the centres of thought, or 
 rather of talk, and in some such subordinate city as 
 that where her life had been passed. She had kept 
 the keen relish for books which seems to dull where 
 books are written and printed, and she had vivid 
 opinions about them which were not faded by con- 
 stant wear. I found also that she knew personally a 
 
158 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 great many of the authors we discussed : it was still 
 in the palmy days of lecturing, and the Faulkners 
 had made their house the hospitable sojourn of every 
 writer who had come to the place to read his essay 
 or poem. She told me that I had the authors' seat 
 at her table, and that the very chair I then sat in 
 had been occupied by Emerson, Curtis, Wendell 
 Phillips, Saxe, Dr. Holland, Bayard Taylor, Mark 
 Twain, and I do not know who else. 
 
 I confess that she fatigued me a little with all that 
 enthusiasm, but except for her passion for authorship 
 in books and out of them, I found that I must revise 
 my impression that she was a romantic person. Her 
 relations with her daughter-in-law had nothing, 
 certainly, of romantic insubstantiality ; they were 
 of the solidest and simplest affection, founded ap- 
 parently upon a confidence as perfect as could have 
 existed between them if Hermia had been her own 
 child. She gave her the head of the table, and she 
 let herself be ruled by her in many little things in 
 which old ladies are apt to be rebellious to younger 
 women. She seemed to wish only to lead the talk, 
 but she deferred to Hermia in several questions of 
 fact as well as taste, and though she always spoke to 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 159 
 
 her as " child," it was evidently with no wish to 
 depose or minify her. On her part Hermia, without 
 seeming to do so, showed herself watchful of Mrs. 
 Faulkner's comfort and pleasure at every moment, 
 and evidently returned her liking in all its cordiality. 
 There was no manner of jealousy between them, per- 
 haps because Mrs. Faulkner could never have been 
 a beauty, and could not even be retrospectively 
 envious of Hermia's magnificence, and partly also 
 because they were temperaments that in being wholly 
 opposite did not in the least wear upon each other. 
 
 This at least was my rapid formulation of the 
 case. The dinner was exquisite, and Mrs. Faulkner 
 praised it with impartial jollity, assuring me that I 
 should have had no such dinner if she had been in 
 authority, but that Hermia's genius for house-keep- 
 ing was such that its inspiration ruled even in her 
 absence. As for herself, she did not know what she 
 was eating. 
 
 " Nor, I hope, how much I am," I said. 
 
 In fact I felt quite torpid after dinner. As we 
 sat before the fire I began to have long dreams be- 
 tween the syllables of the words I heard spoken, and 
 I had a passage of conversation with my wife and 
 
160 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Faulkner, in which it was all pleasantly arranged in 
 regard to Nevil, while I was dimly aware of Mrs. 
 Faulkner's asking me whether I thought George 
 Eliot would Hve as a poet. 
 
 I do not know whether I perceptibly disgraced 
 myself or not. But we made a short evening, and 
 a little after nine o'clock I acquiesced, with an 
 alacrity for which I am sure my wife would never 
 have forgiven me, in Hermia's suggestion that I 
 must be very tired, and would like to go to bed. 
 
III. 
 
 IT was certainly a most anomalous situation, and 
 I woke with the brilliant idea that for my own part 
 in it the whole thing was to take it as naturally as 
 possible ; which was probably reflected into my 
 waking thought from some otherwise wholly van- 
 ished dream. 
 
 I found it early, as to the daylight, but in thafc 
 smoke-dimmed November air it might very well be 
 still rather dark at seven o'clock. I went out for a 
 breath of the pensive confusion which I found still 
 persisted in it, and inhaled my glad youth and my 
 first joy of travel in the odour of those bituminous 
 fumes. The grass was still brightly green on the 
 lawn ] 
 
 " And parting summer lingering blooms delayed " 
 
 in the garden which stretched with box-bordered 
 
 walks and grape-vined trellises to the wall at one 
 
 side of the house. The leaves had dropped from 
 
 L 
 
162 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 the trees, and I picked up from the fallen foliage, 
 soft and dank under my feet, a black walnut, pun- 
 gently aromatic, and redolent of my boyhood. At 
 the same time a faint scent rose from the box, and 
 transported me to that old neglected garden by the 
 sea where I saw Faulkner die. A thrill of immense 
 pity for him pierced my heart. I thought with 
 what a passion of tenderness for that woman he 
 must have planned this house, from which he was 
 now in eternal exile, and her willingness to forget 
 him in her love for another seemed monstrous. It 
 was hard to be a philosophical spectator ; I found 
 myself taking the unfriended side of the dead. 
 
 In the house, when I returned to it, I was met by 
 Faulkner's mother, before that cheerful hall fire. 
 She put aside the damp morning paper which she 
 had just opened to dry in the heat, and gave me her 
 old, soft hand. 
 
 " Do you find many familiar points about the 
 place 1 " she asked. 
 
 " No ; I 'm afraid I hadn't kept any distinct re- 
 membrance of it. At least, it 's all very strange." 
 
 " You would recognise my son's room, I suppose," 
 she said, turning and leading the way down a cor- 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 163 
 
 ridor that branched away from the hall. " The old 
 house is all here ; the new one was built round it ; 
 and we Ve kept poor Douglas's den, as he used to 
 call it, just as it was." 
 
 I thought it an odd fancy she should wish me to 
 visit the place with her, but I concluded that per- 
 haps she wished to tell her daughter I had already 
 seen it, if she should ask. At any rate, I had no 
 comment to make even in my own mind : we all 
 deal as we best can with our bereavements, and it is 
 but lamely, helplessly at the best. 
 
 We had to pass through the library, and I recog- 
 nised some of the rare editions and large paper 
 copies with which poor Faulkner had so quickly 
 surfeited me ; and there were two or three of his 
 ridiculous Madonnas hung about, cold engravings 
 with wide mats in frigid frames of black, after a 
 belated taste for the quiet in art. They made me 
 shiver, and in the room which we entered from the 
 library that night, and found Nevil smoking there, 
 we were now met by a ghostly scent of tobacco, as 
 if from the cigars that Faulkner kept on nervous- 
 ly consuming one after another, as we had talked. 
 It brought back my youth, which seemed haunting 
 
164 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 the city everywhere ; not my youth bright and warm 
 as we find it imagined in the lying books, but cold 
 and dead, the spectre that really revisits after-years, 
 and makes us glad it is dead. 
 
 The stout-hearted old lady pushed back a blind 
 that had swung to across an open casement, and let 
 in the morning sun. " We keep it aired every day ; 
 I can't bear to let it seem to be getting out of use. 
 Hermia feels as I do about it, and she would have 
 asked you to come here and smoke and write your 
 letters ; but I thought perhaps I had better bring 
 you first. She was very tired, and we sat up late, 
 talking. Will you sit down 1 Breakfast will not be 
 ready till half-past eight." 
 
 I obeyed, and she sat down too. I wondered 
 what could be her motive in wishing to keep me 
 there, and what her theory was in bringing up the 
 last matter that I should have supposed she would 
 like to talk of in that place. Perhaps she spoke 
 from that absence of sensation in regard to certain 
 interests of life which we imagine callousness in the 
 old : those interests are simply extinct in them, and 
 they are no harder than the young who still feel 
 them so keenly. Perhaps she still felt them, and 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 165 
 
 meant to make a supreme renunciation of the past 
 on the spot hallowed to her by the strongest associa- 
 tions. I do not know ; I only know that she began 
 to speak, and to speak with a plainness that I have 
 no right to call obtuseness. 
 
IV. 
 
 " MR. MARCH, Hermia has been telling me of what 
 she learnt in Boston from Dr. Wingate." 
 
 "Yes?" I said feebly. 
 
 " It was my wish that slie should go there, and 
 see him, and find out to the last word all that he 
 remembered of Douglas. She would not have gone 
 without my wish ; but it was her wish, too ; or 
 rather it was the necessity of both of us. After we 
 found that paper of Douglas's, which she took with 
 her, we could neither of us rest till we knew every- 
 thing." 
 
 I nodded, for want of wit to say anything relevant, 
 and she went on. 
 
 " I wish to say at once that I thoroughly approve 
 of Hermia's engagement to Mr. Nevil, and that 
 nothing she heard from Dr. Wingate has changed 
 me in the least about it. At first, the engagement 
 was rather a shock to me; but not more so than 
 his offer was to Hermia; perhaps not so much." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 167 
 
 There was no faltering in Mrs. Faulkner's voice, but 
 a tear ran down her cheek. " We are very strangely 
 made, Mr. March. It is twenty years since my 
 husband died, and I have never once thought of 
 marrying again; but I cannot honestly say that I 
 would not have married if I had met any one I 
 loved. I know that such a thing was possible, 
 though I did not know it then. At first, after we 
 have lost some one who is very dear to us, it seems as 
 if henceforward we must live only for the dead : to 
 atone to them for the default of our lives with them, 
 and to make reparation for unkindness. That is the 
 way I felt when my husband died. I wanted to keep 
 myself in communion with him. But that was not 
 possible. Nature soon teaches us better than that ; 
 she shows us that as long as we live upon the earth 
 we cannot live at all for the dead : we can live only 
 for the living." 
 
 " Yes," I said. " I never thought of it before, 
 though." 
 
 " Have you ever known any deep bereavement ? " 
 
 " No ; I have been very fortunate." 
 
 " If you ever have such a sorrow, you will under- 
 stand what I say as you never can without it. I 
 
168 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 had learned the truth when my son died, and I tried 
 to make my daughter accept it from me. But she 
 could not ; she could only accept it from experience. 
 He had been her whole life so long that she did not 
 wish to live any other. No woman ever devoted 
 herself more utterly than she did to him. She could 
 not realise that as long as she remained in the world 
 she could not devote herself to him any more ; that 
 all that had come absolutely to an end. The truth 
 was the harder for her to learn ' by reason of great 
 strength.' She thought that for his sake she could 
 bear not to know what was the trouble of mind in 
 which he died. That was a mistake." 
 
 " My wife and I thought so, when we heard of it. 
 Dr. "Wingate told me about it. But it was very 
 heroic." 
 
 " It was heroic, yes ; but it was impossible. I 
 knew it at the time. If she had made Dr. Wingate 
 tell her then, she could have thought it out and 
 lived it down ; or, if she couldn't have done that, 
 then at least what makes it so cruel now would 
 never have happened." 
 
 "Yes, I see," I said, in the pause which Mrs. 
 Faulkner made. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 169 
 
 " I have always been willing," she resumed, " and 
 sometimes I have been anxious, that Hermia should 
 many again. Marriage is for this world. We are 
 told that by Christ himself, and we know it instinc- 
 tively. Death does dissolve it inexorably ; and 
 although I believe, as Swedenborg says in one of 
 his strange books, that one man and one woman 
 shall live together to all eternity in a union that 
 will make them one personality, still I believe that, 
 as he says, that union may or may not begin on 
 earth, and that it will be formed hereafter without 
 regard to earthly ties. I was not a fool, and I saw 
 that Hermia was young and attractive, and I ex- 
 pected her to have the feelings of other young and 
 attractive women." 
 
 There was a mixture of mysticism and matter-of- 
 fact in this dear old lady's formulation of the case 
 which was bringing me near the verge of a smile, 
 but I said gravely, " Of course." 
 
 " But she never showed the least sign of it ; and 
 when, after Mr. Nevil came back from Europe, their 
 engagement took place, I was entirely unprepared 
 for such a thing. He had been with us a great deal. 
 We nursed him through a long sickness after that 
 
170 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 broken engagement of his in Nebraska, and he was 
 quite like one of ourselves. In fact, his friendship 
 with Douglas dates back so far to the very be- 
 ginning of their college days that I can hardly re- 
 member when James did not seem like a son to me. 
 You mustn't suppose, though, that I ever objected to 
 the engagement, or do now. I highly approve of it 
 But I had always fancied that the very intimacy 
 that Hermia was thrown into with him was un- 
 favourable to her forming any fancy for him. In 
 fact, she has always been rather critical of him ; and 
 I know that she rather dislikes clergymen as men, 
 I mean. She is a religious person in her own way ; 
 I Ve nothing to say against her way. So, as I say, 
 I was sufficiently astonished; but that is neither 
 here nor there. I gave my cordial consent at once. 
 James has not had a very joyous life ; he has made 
 it rather hard for himself, and I suppose that the 
 idea of putting some brightness into it may have 
 
 first made Hermia But at any rate they were 
 
 very happy together ; and though Hermia had her 
 morbid feelings occasionally about Douglas, and 
 seemed to think it was wicked to turn from him 
 to anybody else, and a kind of treason, still, she 
 always listened to me about it, and would be reason- 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 171 
 
 able when I showed her how foolish she was. I 
 wanted her to put his things away, and there I sup- 
 pose I made a little mistake, especially the things 
 connected with his last days writings and letters, 
 and odd scraps, that she was always intending to 
 look over, and never quite had the strength for. 
 She consented to burn them ; but she could not 
 bring herself to do that without reading them ; and 
 so we found that paper which she carried to Dr. 
 Wingate. Do you know what was in it ? " 
 
 " No, certainly. She showed it to him in our 
 presence, and I think she was willing we should 
 know, but he decided very wisely that he would 
 rather speak with her alone about it." 
 
 My feeling did not seem to make much impres- 
 sion upon Mrs. Faulkner. " I suppose you do know, 
 Mr. March, that my son was not quite in his right 
 mind when he died ? " 
 
 I admitted that I had some misgivings to that 
 effect. 
 
 " I don't understand," she went on, " why we 
 should be so ashamed to acknowledge that any one 
 connected with us is not perfectly sane. As if the 
 world were not full of crazy people ! As if we were 
 not all a little crazy on some point or other ! The 
 
172 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 pain he suffered had affected his mind; it's very 
 common, I believe; and he had a delusion that 
 showed itself in the form of a dream, but that 
 would have been sure, if he lived, to have broken 
 out in a mania." 
 
 She stopped, as if she expected me to prompt her 
 or agree with her, and I said, " Yes, Dr. Wingate 
 told me something of the kind." 
 
 " But he gave you no hint of what the dream 
 the delusion was ? " 
 
 " None." 
 
 " We used often to try to think what it could 
 be. It seemed to give him a dislike or distrust for 
 Hermia ; and we thought we hardly ever spoke of 
 it openly ; now we must handle it without shrink- 
 ing, no matter what pain it gives 1 We thought 
 that it involved some fear of violence from her. 
 People whose minds are beginning to be affected 
 often have such dreadful fancies about those who 
 are dearest to them." 
 
 " Yes, yes, I know," I said, and I hope I did not 
 let my tone express the slight impatience I felt at 
 being obliged to traverse ground I had been over 
 with Hermia already in this quest 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 173 
 
 "But it was nothing of that kind whatever. It 
 was " Mrs. Faulkner hesitated, as if to prepare me 
 for a great surprise "jealousy." 
 
 "Jealousy?" I repeated, and I could not help 
 throwing into the word a touch of the surprise 
 which she evidently expected of me. I had not 
 followed her so far without perceiving that an old 
 lady so devoted to literature valued the literary 
 quality of the situation ; that with all her good 
 sense and true and just feeling she had the foible 
 of being rather proud of a passage in her family 
 life which was so like a passage of romance. 
 
 "Yes," she went on. " And of all things, jealousy 
 of her with with James." I could say nothing to 
 a fact which I had conjectured long before, and she 
 continued : " Dr. "Wingate seemed to think that now 
 she had better know exactly what the dream was, 
 since the paper we had found distressed her so much, 
 and take it in the right way. It was a scribble in 
 one of his note-books, on a leaf that he had torn out 
 and probably meant to tear up. It had the date, 
 and it spoke of his having that dream again ; that 
 he had begun to have it every night, and if he fell 
 asleep by day. The leaf was torn, out at the side 
 
174 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 in places, and you could only read scraps of sentences, 
 but it all accused her of wishing his death. It 
 would have driven any other woman wild, hut Her- 
 mia had been through too much already. She told 
 me something of it, to explain the paper as well as 
 she could; and she said that she knew you and 
 Mrs. March had noticed something strange in 
 Douglas's manner toward her the day you were 
 there ; and I urged her to go right on and consult 
 you both, and see Dr. Wingate, and find out exactly 
 what the trouble was." 
 
 I was silent, for want of anything fitting to say, 
 though she seemed to expect me to speak. 
 
 " The doctor told her that Douglas had been hav- 
 ing the dream almost a year before he died : at first 
 every month or two, and then every week. So far 
 as he could remember, it was always exactly the 
 same thing from the very beginning. He dreamed 
 that she and James were attached, and were wait- 
 ing for him to die, so that they could get married. 
 Then he would see them getting married in church, 
 and at the same time it would be his own funeral, 
 and he would try to scream out that he was not 
 dead ; but Hermia would smile, and say to the people 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 175 
 
 that she had known James before she knew Douglas ; 
 and then "both ceremonies would go on, and he would 
 wake. That was all." 
 
 "It seems to me quite enough. Horrible ! Hor- 
 rible ! I 'm surprised that Wingate should have told 
 her." 
 
 "He had to do so. There was nothing else. 
 She got it from him by questioning ; though I sup- 
 pose he thought it best she should know just what 
 the trouble was, so that she could see how perfectly 
 fantastic it was, and be able to deal with it accord- 
 ingly." 
 
 " Poor man ! How he must have suffered from 
 that unrelenting nightmare ! And it seems too 
 ghastly to drag from his grave the secret he kept 
 while he lived." These thoughts were so vivid in 
 my mind that I should not have been surprised if 
 Mrs. Faulkner had replied to them like spoken 
 words. 
 
 But she only said: "There were some strange 
 details of the dream, which it seems Dr. Wingate 
 recalled ; he may have written it down after hearing 
 Douglas tell it ; and from the description of the 
 church which he gave, Hermia recognised it as one 
 
176 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 here in the city : James's own church. Of course," 
 said the old lady, ignoring the shudder with which 
 I received this final touch, "Dr. Wingate might 
 not have been so explicit if he had known of Her- 
 mia's engagement to James. I suppose you hadn't 
 told him?" 
 
 " No," I said, and I set that omission down as the 
 chief enormity in -a life which has not been free 
 from some blunders worse than crimes. 
 
 " Well, that is the whole affair, and we must act 
 at once," said Mrs. Faulkner. 
 
 "Break off the engagement, of course," was at my 
 tongue's end ; but I found out I had said nothing 
 when she added 
 
 "James must know it all without delay. He has 
 been out of town, but he will be home to-night, and 
 he must know it before he meets Hermia again." 
 
 "Of course,"! said. 
 
 "We talked it over late into the night, and we 
 both came to that conclusion. In fact, Hermia had 
 thought it out on the way home : and she said that 
 just as the train came in sight of home yesterday, 
 it all flashed upon her what she must do. She must 
 leave the future wholly to James, to do whatever he 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 177 
 
 thought right after he knew everything. She says 
 it came to her like a sudden relief from pain. You 
 must have thought it strange we could keep up, as 
 we did in the evening, but it was the revulsion of 
 feeling with her, and I knew nothing till you left us. 
 She merely said, when we met, 'It is all right, 
 mother,' and I should have thought so, if she had 
 told me every word. The decision she reached is 
 the only one. We must leave it to James. She 
 rests in that, and I can't say whether the thought of 
 my poor son's illusion troubles her or not, in itself. 
 I know that it ought not to trouble her ; but at the 
 same time I know that it is something which we 
 ought not to keep from James. Men often look at 
 things very differently from women, the best of 
 
V. 
 
 IT went through my mind that the affections being 
 the main interest of women's lives, perhaps they 
 dealt with them more practically if not more whole- 
 somely than men. Certainly their treatment of 
 them seems much more business-like. 
 
 Heaven knows what was really in that old woman's 
 heart, as she talked so bravely of a future from 
 which even her son's memory was to be obliterated. 
 Whether it was a sacrifice of herself she was com- 
 pleting, or whether she was accomplishing an end 
 which she freely intended, I shall never be certain ; 
 but I thought afterward that she had perhaps schooled 
 herself to look only at Hermia's side of the affair, 
 and had come to feel that she could do no wrong to 
 the dead, whom she could no longer help, by seeking 
 the happiness of the living, whom she could help so 
 much. I myself have always reasoned to this effect, 
 and in what I had to do with it I did my best to 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 179 
 
 bring others to the same mind ; and yet at that 
 moment, in that place, it seemed a hellish thing. I 
 saw Faulkner with the inner vision by which alone, 
 doubtless, we see the dead, standing there where I 
 first met him, by that table where we were sitting, 
 with his long nervous fingers, yellowed at their tips 
 by his cigar, trembling on an open page ; and then I 
 saw him fall back on the seat of the arbour in the 
 old seaside garden and die. What a long tragedy it 
 was that had passed between those two meetings ! 
 Had not his suffering won him the right to remem- 
 brance 1 None of us would have denied this, but 
 what was proposed was to forget him ; to blot his 
 memory and his sorrow, as he had himself been 
 blotted, out of the world for ever. The living must 
 do this for their lives' sake; the dead must not 
 master us through an immortal grief. All the same 
 I pitied Faulkner, pitied him even for his baleful 
 dream, whose shadow had clouded his own life, and 
 seemed destined to follow that of others as relent- 
 lessly ; and I pitied him all the more because there 
 seemed no one to do it but me, who had cared for 
 him so little while he lived. He had suffered greatly, 
 and by no fault of his own, unless you could blame 
 
180 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 his folly in having his friend so familiarly a part of 
 his home that his crazy jealousy must make him its 
 object almost necessarily. But even this weakness, 
 culpable as it was, was a weakness and not a wrong ; 
 and no casuistry could prove it malevolent. Some- 
 thing impersonally sinister was in it all, and the 
 group involved was severally as blameless as the 
 victims of fate in a Greek trilogy. Neither I nor 
 any other witness of the fact considered for a moment 
 that Faulkner had cause for the dark suspicion which 
 was the beginning and the end of his dream. 
 
 I do not know whether Mrs. Faulkner had been 
 saying anything else before I woke from these 
 thoughts and heard her say, "I have spoken very 
 fully and freely to you, Mr. March, both because 
 you knew much of this matter already, and because 
 I need Hermia needs your help. We depend 
 upon your kindness ; we are quite helpless without 
 you, and you were one of my son's early friends, and 
 can enter into our feelings." 
 
 "I assure you, Mrs. Faulkner," I began; and I 
 was going to say that the matter of my early friend- 
 ship with her son had somehow always been strangely 
 exaggerated ; but I found that I could not decently 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 181 
 
 do this, under the circumstances, and I said " There 
 is nothing in my power that I wouldn't gladly do 
 for you." 
 
 " I was certain of that," she answered. " James 
 must know of this of the whole fact as soon as he 
 gets back. But Hermia can't write to him about it, 
 and I can't speak to him." I began to feel a cold 
 apprehension steal over me ; at the same time a light 
 of intelligence concerning Hermia's hospitable eager- 
 ness to make me her guest dawned upon me. Could 
 that exquisite creature, in that electrical moment of 
 relief from her trouble have foreseen my usefulness 
 by the same flash that showed her the simple duty 
 she had in the matter 1 I do not think I should 
 have blamed her, if that were the case ; and I was 
 prepared for Mrs. Faulkner's conclusion : " We must 
 ask you to speak to James." 
 
 I was prepared, but I was certainly dismayed, too ; 
 and I promptly protested : " My dear Mrs. Faulkner, 
 I don't see how I could possibly do that. I am very 
 sorry, very sorry indeed ; but I cannot. I should 
 not feel warranted in assuming such a confidential 
 mission to Mr. Nevil, by my really slight acquaint- 
 ance, or by anything in my past relations with your 
 
182 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 son. I have been most reluctant to know anything 
 about this painful business," and if this was not 
 quite true, it was certainly true that I had not 
 sought to know anything. "At every point my 
 wife and I have respected the secrecy in which we 
 felt it ought to remain, even against the impulse of 
 sympathetic curiosity." 
 
 " Then Mrs. March did not tell you what it was 
 when you started home with Hermia ? " 
 
 " Surely not ! She would have thought it a 
 betrayal of Mrs. Faulkner that would have been 
 embarrassing to me ; and how could you suppose I 
 would let you go on and tell me the whole story if 
 I knew it already ? " 
 
 "I didn't think of that," said Mrs. Faulkner. 
 " Hermia and I both took it for granted that Mrs. 
 March had told you." I did not say anything, and 
 she added ruefully, " Then I don't know what we 
 shall do. Is it asking too much to ask if you can 
 suggest anything ? " 
 
 I knew from her tone that she was hurt as well as 
 disappointed by this refusal of mine to act for them ; 
 strange as it appears, she must have counted un- 
 questioningly upon my consent. I said, to gain time 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 183 
 
 as much as possible, for I had no doubt on that 
 point, " Excuse me, Mrs. Faulkner, do I under- 
 stand this request to come from you both ? " 
 
 " No ; my daughter knows nothing about it. The 
 idea of asking you was entirely my own and I 
 made a point of seeing you as soon as possible, this 
 morning. If you must refuse, I beg you will not let 
 her know." 
 
 " You may depend upon my silence, Mrs. Faulk- 
 ner. But," and I rose and began to walk about the 
 room, "why should you tell Mr. Nevil what the 
 dream was ; or at least that it concerned him ? We 
 must consider that, in the light of reason, the thing 
 is non-existent. It has no manner of substance, or 
 claim upon any one's conscience, or even interest. 
 Dr. Wingate did not wish Mrs. Faulkner to know 
 it ; and I really think that when she insisted, he 
 would have done wisely and righteously to lie to her 
 about it. I 'm sure he would have done so if he had 
 known that she was engaged to Mr. Nevil. But it 's 
 too late, now ; the mischief 's done, as far as she 's 
 concerned. The question is now how to stop the 
 evil from going farther ; and I say there is no 
 necessity for Mr. Nevil's knowing anything about it. 
 
184 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Treat it from this moment as the unreality which it 
 is ; ignore it." 
 
 I went on to the same effect ; but as I talked I 
 knew more and more that I was wasting my breath, 
 and in a bad cause, and I saw that Mrs. Faulkner 
 even ceased to follow me. One of the maids came 
 to my rescue with the announcement that breakfast 
 was served. We followed her, and I ate with the 
 appetite to which I have noticed that the exercise of 
 the sympathies always gives an edge of peculiar 
 keenness. 
 
VI. 
 
 HERMIA did not join us at breakfast, but I had 
 no need to account for her absence upon that theory 
 of extreme fatigue from her journey, which Mrs. 
 Faulkner urged with so much superfluous apology. 
 I began to have my reluctances about that old lady, 
 to wish to escape from her, because I had refused to 
 oblige her in that little matter of interviewing Nevil, 
 and I was afraid she would recur to it. I made an 
 excuse of wanting to look about the town, and I 
 went out as soon as I could get away after breakfast. 
 
 Now that I was there, and had come so far, I was 
 willing to see all I could of the place, and of several 
 people in it whom I remembered as very charming ; 
 and I felt exasperated by the terms of my presence. 
 I reviled myself for going to the Faulkners, though I 
 knew I could not help it ; but being their guest I 
 could not leave them except to leave town. I 
 strolled about harassed with the notion that I would 
 
186 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 go on the night express, and denying myself in the 
 interest of this early departure all those little lapses 
 into sentiment concerning the past which I had 
 always expected to indulge when I returned to its 
 scenes. I found myself unwilling to meet my old 
 friends, with the burden on me of having to say that 
 I was there only for the day, and to explain that I 
 had come on with Mrs. Faulkner, and was her guest. 
 I hated the air of mystery the affair would have ; 
 but there was one person whom I could not really 
 think of going away without seeing. As a young 
 man I used to come and go in her house as freely as 
 in my own home, at any time between nine in the 
 morning and twelve at night ; she had been kind to 
 me, and helpful and inspiring, as only a brilliant 
 woman of the world, who is also good, can be to an 
 ambitious, shy, awkward young fellow of twenty- 
 two ; and I decided to make hers stand for all the 
 friendships of the past. 
 
 She made me so sweetly welcome that in a moment 
 we had broken through the little web of alienation 
 that the spider years had been spinning between us ; 
 and found ourselves exactly in the old relations 
 again. I had been a little curious, after seeing so 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 187 
 
 much of the world, to see whether she would appear 
 as clever and accomplished as she used to seem ; and 
 I was glad to find she bore the test of my mature 
 experience perfectly. After all, it is such women 
 who make the polite world, wherever we find it; 
 not the world them. Her tact divined, without any 
 motion of mine, all the external points of the case, 
 and made it seem even to me the most natural thing 
 possible that I should have seized the occasion of 
 Mrs. Faulkner's being in Boston to run out with her 
 to my old home, if only for a day, and give my old 
 friends a glimpse of me. She supposed that I must 
 be devoted to the Faulkners for the short time I 
 stayed, and she would merely insist upon my lunch- 
 ing with her ; she would make my peace with Mrs. 
 Faulkner. Was not she exquisite ? Had I ever met 
 any one just like her ? And what a life of self-devo- 
 tion, and then of sorrow ! No, no one could under- 
 stand what she had been through, unless they had 
 seen something of it day by day. But I had seen 
 something ; the most tragical thing of all, perhaps ; 
 and my wife had been so good ! Mrs. Faulkner had 
 told her about Mrs. March. 
 
 The talk naturally confined itself to Mrs. Faulkner 
 
188 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 for a time, and it naturally returned to her from 
 whatever excursions it made in other directions. 
 After a while, it began, somehow, to include Nevil, 
 whom I found to be another of my friend's enthu- 
 siasms ; she celebrated him with the fervour that is 
 rather characteristic of hero-and-heroine worship in 
 small places, where people almost have their noses 
 against the altar. I trembled inwardly for the secret 
 I was guarding, for I felt that my friend would have 
 it out of me in an instant if she suspected me of its 
 custody, but apparently she knew nothing of the 
 engagement. She asked me if I had heard of that 
 horrid affair out West which had given poor Mr. 
 Nevil back to them again ; and she said she supposed 
 he would never think of marrying, now. She wished 
 that he would marry Hermia Faulkner ; it would be 
 more than appropriate ; it would be ideal ; they were 
 exactly suited to each other ; and she could help him 
 in his work as no other woman could. She deserved 
 some happiness ; but it would be like her to go on 
 dedicating her whole existence to the memory of 
 a man who was really her inferior, and who had 
 nothing to commend him to her constancy except 
 his love for her. Of his love for her you could not 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 189 
 
 say enough ; but my friend reminded me that she 
 had never considered him the wonderful person that 
 some people thought him ; and she scouted the 
 notion of his having married beneath him in marry- 
 ing Hermia Winter. Her people were very nice 
 people, though they were so poor ; they were ideal- 
 ists ; and her father had come West and settled on 
 Pawpaw Creek after the failure of one of those com- 
 munities in New England, which he had been con- 
 nected with. As for Hermia herself, whom my 
 friend remembered in her Bell's Institute days, she 
 was a girl of the rarest intelligence and character ; a 
 being quite supernal! y above a ward politician, and 
 a pretentious dilettante like Douglas Faulkner, whose 
 " three times skimmed sky-blue" Virginia blood was 
 full of the barbaric pride of a race of slave-holders. 
 As my friend went on she characterised poor Faulkner 
 with a violent excess which would have satisfied even 
 Mrs. March the day when she first met him at Swamp- 
 scott, and he betrayed his defective tastes in litera- 
 ture and art. Of course I said that this was exactly 
 the way in which he had impressed my wife ; and I 
 defended him. But she told me I might spare my 
 breath ; that she knew I really thought just as my 
 
190 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 wife and she did about him ; and that if James Nevil 
 had not been a saint upon earth he never could have 
 endured the man. 
 
 " We are both saints," I suggested. " I endured 
 him." 
 
 " Oh no, you 're not. Nevil really loved him, 
 and I believe he loves his memory to this day." 
 
 " Well, at any rate Faulkner 's out of the story," 
 I urged. 
 
 "I'm not so sure 01 that!" cried my friend. 
 "I'm afraid it's their foolish constancy to him that 
 keeps those two from thinking of each other." 
 
 " Are you, really 1 " I asked, and I found a per- 
 verse amusement in playing with her shrewd ignor- 
 ance so near my knowledge, which it could so easily 
 have penetrated. " It seems to me that if they 
 were inclined to each other, their allegiance to the 
 dead would have very little effect. I suspect that 
 conscience, or the moral sentiments, or whatever we 
 call the supersensuous equipment, has nothing to do 
 with people's falling in love, except to find reasons 
 and justifications for it, and to add a zest to it." 
 
 ". I will write that to Mrs. March," said my friend, 
 " and ask her if those are her ideas, too." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 191 
 
 " Oh, I know !" I answered airily. " You ladies 
 like to pretend that it's an affair of the soul, or if 
 possible, of the intellect ; and as your favour is the 
 breath of the novelists' nostrils, they all flatter you 
 up in your pretension, till you get to believing in it 
 yourselves. But at the bottom of your hearts, you 
 know, as ive do, that it 's a plain, earthly affair, for 
 this life, for this trip and train only." 
 
 " Shocking ! shocking ! " said my friend, shaking 
 her head, which had grown charmingly grey, in a 
 marquise manner, and evincing her delight in the 
 boldness with which I handled the matter. 
 
 " You may be sure," I concluded, " that if these 
 two people have not fallen in love, it 's because they 
 don't fancy each other. If they did, there would be 
 no consideration of sentiment, no air-woven tie of 
 fealty to a love or a friendship of the past which 
 would hold them in the leash. If Faulkner's ghost 
 rose between them, they would plunge through it 
 into each other's arms." 
 
 " Ah, now you are talking atrociously 1 " said my 
 friend. 
 
 I had indeed been hurried a little beyond myself 
 by a sudden realisation of the fact that so far as 
 
192 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 Hermia was concerned, the past was obliterated by 
 her determination to leave everything to Nevil ; and 
 that as soon as Nevil knew everything, he would 
 decide, as I should have decided, that every consi- 
 deration of honour and delicacy and duty, as well as 
 of love, bound him to her. An added impulse had 
 been given to my words by the consciousness that I 
 was the only means of making her determination 
 known to him, that whether she had inspired her 
 mother to ask this service of me or not, she tacitly 
 hoped it, and that in the end I should probably 
 somehow render it. 
 
 But I instinctively fought off from it as long as I 
 could, and I resolved to leave town without render- 
 ing it if possible. I spent most of the afternoon 
 with my friend ; and she sent a late embassy to the 
 Faulkners to know if she might keep me to dinner. 
 They consented, as they must ; Hermia herself wrote 
 that she consented only because she was so com- 
 pletely prostrated that she could not hope to see 
 me at dinner, and her mother was not well ; they 
 counted upon having me several days with them, 
 and they would not be selfish. 
 
VII. 
 
 THE Faulkners of course kne\v nothing of my in- 
 tention of going that night, and I stayed rather late 
 after dinner, so that I should not have much more 
 time than I needed to pack my bag and catch my 
 train. I thought that if I could not altogether 
 escape an embarrassing urgence from them to stay 
 longer, I could at least cut it short. But I found 
 that it was a needless precaution when I went back 
 to them. Mrs. Faulkner, the mother, received my 
 reasons for hurrying home with all the acquiescence 
 I could have wished. She said she knew I must be 
 anxious to get back to my family whom I had left 
 at such short notice ; that Hermia and herself ap- 
 preciated my kindness and my wife's goodness more 
 than they could ever express ; but they hoped and 
 prayed that if our need should ever be like theirs 
 we might find such friends in it as we had been to 
 them. I felt an unintentional irony in these thanks 
 N 
 
194 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 so far as they concerned the perfection of my own 
 friendship, but I still had no disposition to repair its 
 lack by offering to see Nevil for her. That, I felt, 
 more and more, I could not do; but I stood a 
 moment, questioning whether I ought not to renew 
 my expressions of regret that I could not do it. I 
 ended by saying that I hoped all would turn out for 
 the best with them ; and I added some platitudes and 
 inanities which she seemed not to hear, for she broke 
 in upon them with excuses for Hermia, who would not 
 be able to see me, she was afraid. I said I knew 
 what a wretched day she had been having, and I 
 left my adieux with Mrs. Faulkner for her. Perhaps 
 if I had not myself been so distraught I might have 
 noticed more the incoherent attention Mrs. Faulkner 
 was able to give me throughout this interview. But 
 I did not realise it till afterward. I went to my 
 room, glad to have it over so easily, and resolved to 
 get out of the house with all possible despatch. I 
 had a carriage at the gate, and I looked forward to 
 .waiting an hour and a half in the depot before my 
 train started with more pleasure than such a pro- 
 spect ever inspired in me before. 
 
 In the confusion which afterward explained and 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 195 
 
 justified itself, Mrs. Faulkner had failed to offer me 
 the superfluous help of a servant to fetch down my 
 bag, and I was descending the stairs with it in my 
 hand when I heard a door close in the corridor 
 which led to Faulkner's den. Steps uneven and 
 irregular advanced toward the square hall at the foot 
 of the stairs, and in a moment I saw a man stagger 
 into the light, and stay himself by a clutch at the 
 newel post. He looked around as if dazed, and 
 then vaguely up at me, where I stood as motionless 
 and helpless as he. I have no belief he saw me ; 
 but at any rate, Nevil turned at the cry of "James ! 
 James ! " which came in Hermia's voice from the 
 corridor, and caught her in his arms as she flew 
 upon him. She locked her arms around his neck, 
 and wildly kissed him again and again, with sobs 
 such as break from the ruin of life and love ; with 
 gasps like dying, and with a fond, passionate moan- 
 ing broken by the sound of those fierce, swift kisses. 
 I pitied her far too much to feel ashamed of my 
 involuntary witness of the scene ; though as for 
 that I do not believe she would have foregone one 
 caress if she had known that all the world was 
 looking. I perceived that this was the end ; and I 
 
196 THE SHADOW OF A DKEAM. 
 
 understood as clearly as if I had been told that she 
 had confided her secret to him, had left their fate 
 in his hands, and that he had decided against their 
 love. It maddened me against him, to think he 
 had done that. I did not know, I did not care, what 
 motive, what reason, what scruple had governed 
 him; I felt that there could be only one good in 
 the world, and that was the happiness of that 
 woman. For the moment this happiness seemed 
 centred and existent solely in her possession of him. 
 But I was sensible, through my compassion and my 
 indignation, that whatever he had done, she was 
 admiring, adoring him for it. I saw that in a flash 
 of her upturned face, as I stood, with my heart in 
 my mouth, before the tragedy of their renunciation. 
 The play suddenly ended. With one last long kiss 
 she pushed him from her, and fled back into the 
 corridor. 
 
VIII. 
 
 I FOUND myself outside in the night, and at the 
 gate I found Nevil in parley with my coachman, 
 who was explaining to him that he was engaged to 
 take a gentleman inside the house, there, to the 
 depot, and could not carry Nevil home. 
 
 "Get in, Mr. Nevil," I said. "I've plenty of 
 time, and can drop you wherever you say." 
 
 Ifc was as if we had both just come out of the 
 theatre, and actor and spectator had met on the 
 same footing of the commonplace world of reality. 
 
 " Oh, Mr. March ! " he said. " Is that you 1 I 
 iclll drive with you as far as my study, if you '11 let 
 me. I don't feel quite able to walk." 
 
 " Yes, certainly, Get in." 
 
 He gave the direction, "St. Luke's Church," and 
 I followed him into the hack, and he shrank into 
 the corner, and scarcely spoke till we reached the 
 church. By the gleams that the street lamps threw 
 into the windows as we passed them I had glimpses 
 
198 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 of his face, haggard and estranged. He tried to fit 
 his latch-key to the door in the church edifice, and 
 then gave it to me, saying, with pathetic feebleness, 
 " You do it. I can't. And don't go don't leave 
 me," he added, as we entered. " Come in, a moment." 
 
 I told the driver to wait, and I suppose he had his 
 conjectures as to the condition in which I was get- 
 ting the Rev. James Nevil into his study. He was 
 like one drunk, and he went reeling and stumbling 
 before me. Once within he seemed almost uncon- 
 scious of me, where he sat sunken in an arm-chair, 
 staring at the fire in the grate, and I waited for him 
 to speak. At last I made a movement, and he took 
 it as a sign of departure and put out his hand 
 entreatingly. " No, no ! You mustn't go. I 
 
 want to tell you " And then he lapsed again 
 
 into his silence. At last he broke from it with a 
 long sigh : that " Ah-h-h ! " which I remembered 
 from the time when he spoke, on the cliffs by the 
 sea, of Faulkner's unkindness to Hermia. "Well, 
 it is ended ! " 
 
 I had not the heart to pretend that I did not know 
 what he meant. I said nothing, and he lifted his face 
 toward me where I stood, leaning on his chimney-piece. 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 199 
 
 "Hermia has told me that you know about this 
 unhappiness of ours," he said hoarsely. " Your 
 knowledge makes you the one human being whom I 
 can speak to of it ; perhaps it gives you the right to 
 know all all there is." 
 
 " No, no," I protested. " I have no claim, and I 
 haven't the wish." I mechanically referred to my 
 watch, and seeing that I had abundant time before 
 my train went, I dropped into the chair beside the 
 hearth, and ended by saying, " But I should be glad 
 if I could in any way serve you or help you. I do 
 know the painful situation in which you are placed, 
 and though I can truly say that neither my wife nor 
 I have ever tried to know of it, I confess that we 
 have been most deeply interested, and you have 
 both had our sympathy in a measure which I needn't 
 try to express." I instinctively calmed my tone to 
 an effect of quiet upon his agitation. 
 
 " You have been very good far kinder friends 
 than we could have hoped to find, and there is 
 nothing that such friends as you may not know, so 
 far as we are concerned. But there is very little 
 more to tell. It is all over." 
 
 I thought he wished me to ask how, and I said, 
 
200 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " Mrs. Faulkner's mother told me this morning that 
 they were waiting to see you or rather to let you 
 
 know on your return " 
 
 " Yes. I expected to return to-night, but I came 
 back late this afternoon, and I went directly to them, 
 of course. It was not what Hermia wished it was 
 what she dreaded most but it was doubtless for 
 the best; at any rate it happened. In a moment 
 we were confronted with our question. She told 
 me, fully and fearlessly, as she deals with every- 
 thing, just what it was, and we set ourselves to 
 solve it to solve it, if possible, in favour of our- 
 selves, our weakness, perhaps our sin ! " His head 
 dropped on his breast, and I saw his eyes fixed with a 
 dreary stare on the smouldering fire. I was sensible, 
 without looking about it much, of the character of 
 the room. It was one of those studies which clergy- 
 men for their convenience sometimes have in their 
 church buildings, and where I suppose they go to 
 read and write and think, and transact church busi- 
 ness with the officers of their church, and receive 
 people who come to them for counsel or comfort 
 in such straits as those which bring us in piteous 
 entreaty before the ministers of conscience. It is a 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 201 
 
 kind of Protestant confessional ; and while I waited 
 for Nevil to speak again, I recalled stories I had 
 heard of guilty souls seeking such an asylum for that 
 relief which we shall all know at the judgment-day, 
 when we shall be stripped bare before the divine 
 compassion down to our inmost thoughts and pur- 
 poses. Women who have betrayed their husbands 
 go there to own their shame ; men that have cheated 
 and stolen and lied go there to lay the burden of 
 their wrong-doing upon the priest of God ; and with 
 these a mass of minor sinners, with their peccadil- 
 loes of temper and breeding and deceit ; as well as 
 the self-accusers who wish to purge their spirits even 
 of the dread of sin, and to receive the acquittal which 
 they cannot give themselves. More and more as 
 Nevil went on it seemed to me that the place 
 was not favourable to a judicial examination of 
 his own case ; that the colour of things he had 
 heard there must stain and blacken the facts of his 
 own experience, and prevent him from seeing 
 them aright. 
 
 " The question was," he said, lifting his head, and 
 bending that hopeless stare on me, " not what we 
 should do, with that shadow of Faulkner's dream 
 
202 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 hanging over us, but what we had done what / had 
 done to cause him the torment of such a dream." 
 
 " For Heaven's sake, Mr. Nevil," I broke in, " don't 
 take that way of looking at it. You had no more 
 to do with causing that dream than I had. The 
 pain he suffered the physical pain caused the 
 craze which his dream came from. It was a som- 
 nambulic mania nothing more and nothing less. 
 Dr. Wingate assured Mrs. Faulkner in the most 
 solemn manner " 
 
 " Ah, the sincerity of a doctor with his patient ! 
 He is a skilful man, very able, very learned ; he 
 knows all about the body, but the soul and its 
 secrets are beyond science. There are facts in the 
 case that he has never had before him. I knew 
 Hermia first, in the loveliness of her young girlhood, 
 and I brought her and Faulkner together." 
 
 I murmured, " Yes, I remember you told me." 
 
 " I saw the impression she instantly made upon 
 him: it was love at first sight. But though the 
 love of her had possessed his whole soul, he was 
 first faithful to his friendship with me. In that 
 childlike, simple, cordial truthfulness of his, which 
 no one ever knew so fully as I, and which I shall 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 203 
 
 never see in any other man, he pressed me to tell 
 him whether I had any feeling for her myself, for 
 then he would go away, and live his passion down, 
 as best he could, and leave her to me. I assured 
 him that I had no such feeling, no feeling but that 
 pleasure in her beauty and goodness which every 
 one must have in her presence, and they were 
 married." 
 
 The silence following upon the gasp in which 
 these words ended was not such as I could break. 
 After a moment Nevil went on 
 
 " I believed what I said ; I have never doubted 
 it till this day. But how do I know how do I 
 know that I was not in love with her then, that I 
 have not always been in love with her through all 
 his life and death 1 It is such a subtle, such a fatal 
 thing in its perversion ! I have seen it in others ; 
 why shouldn't it be in me ? Why shouldn't we 
 have been playing a part unknowingly to ourselves, 
 hypocrites before our own souls ? Why should I 
 ever have consented to be with them, to qualify 
 their home by an alien presence, through the daily, 
 hourly lie of friendship for him, except that I loved 
 her, and longed to be near her 1 Why could not I 
 
204 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 have kept the love of that poor, foolish young girl, 
 innocent and harmless, for all her levity, which she 
 gave me out there in the "West, except that in the 
 guilty inmost of my heart there was no room for 
 anything but love for my friend's wife, whom it had 
 made his widow ? Why " 
 
 " Hold on ! Wait ! This is monstrous ! " I 
 broke in upon him. " It 's atrocious. You 're the 
 victim of your own morbid introspection, of a kind 
 of self-analysis that never ends in anything but self- 
 conviction. I know what it is, every one knows; 
 and it 's your right, it 's your duty as a man to stand 
 out against it, and not let the honest and lawful 
 feeling you now have damn the past to shame ! " 
 
 I spoke vehemently, far beyond any explicit right 
 I had to adjure him, but I could see that my words 
 had not the slightest weight with him. 
 
 " And Hermia," he went on, " why should she 
 have cared nothing for Faulkner at first 1 Why, 
 when she believed she had schooled herself to love 
 him, should she have suffered the ever-repeated in- 
 trusion of my presence in her home ? Why should 
 she have refused so long to know what his dream 
 was ? Why should we have made such haste to 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 205 
 
 separate after Faulkner's death, and then why 
 should my thoughts have turned so instantly to 
 her, with such longing for her pity, in that shame 
 I underwent, and why should she have honoured and 
 not despised me for a misfortune that my own folly 
 had provoked ? There is one answer to it all ! " 
 
 " And the answer is that your view of the case is 
 as purely an aberration as Faulkner's dream." 
 
 " Ah, you can't account for everything on the 
 ground of madness ! Somewhere, some time, there 
 must be responsibility for wrong." 
 
 " Even if we have to find it in innocence ! I tell 
 you that your view of the situation is as false as that 
 which the lowest scandal-mongering mind of an enemy 
 could take of it. You are bound to let your own char- 
 acter or if not your character, then her character, 
 her nature count for something in making up such 
 a judgment. I will leave you out of the question, if 
 you like, but I would stake my life upon the single- 
 ness of her devotion in thought, feeling, and deed 
 to that wretched man whose misery seems such an 
 inextinguishable poison. It's preposterous that I 
 should be defending her to you; but if you have 
 suffered her to share these misgivings of yours, I say 
 
206 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 you've done a cruel thing. I know her mother 
 told me that after what she underwent from learn- 
 ing just what Faulkner's dream was and my wife 
 and I saw something of her suffering, both in Boston 
 and on the way out here " 
 
 " Ah h h ! " he breathed. 
 
 " She had found peace in her reliance, her perfect 
 faith in your conscience, in your sense of justice, and 
 your instinct of right ; and, if you will allow me to say 
 so, you were most sacredly bound not to let any per- 
 verse scruple, any self-indulgent misgiving, betray her 
 trust in you. You are a man, with a man's larger 
 outlook, and you should have been the perspective 
 in which she could see the whole matter truly. If 
 you have failed her in this you have been guilty of 
 something worse than anything you accuse yourself 
 of. Take the thing at its worst ! I refuse to con- 
 sider that she ever allowed her fancy to stray from 
 her duty, but suppose that you were in love with 
 her, in that unconscious way you imagine : who was 
 hurt, who was deceived by it ? What harm was 
 done ? I will go farther, and ask what harm was 
 there, even if you knew you were in love with her ? 
 You let no one else know it her, least of any." 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 207 
 
 The words, when I had got them out, shocked me ; 
 they certainly did not represent my own feeling 
 about such a situation ; I was glad my wife had 
 not heard them ; and I saw the horror of me that 
 came into Nevil's face. I felt myself getting hot 
 and red, and I hastened to add, "You will forgive 
 me, if I try to put before you the mere legal, practi- 
 cal, matter-of-fact view of the affair," and I could 
 not help remembering that it was also the romantic 
 view, which I had found celebrated in many novels 
 as something peculiarly fine and noble and high, 
 something heroic in the silently suffering lover. " I 
 admit that I have no right to speak to you at 
 all " 
 
 " Go on ; I invite you to speak," he said gently. 
 
 " Then I will say that my only desire is to to 
 how shall I say it ? urge that this is altogether an 
 affair of the future, and that if you allow the un- 
 happy past, which is dead, and ought to be buried 
 with Faulkner, to dominate you, or to shape your 
 relations, you seem to me to be " 
 
 I found myself talking sophistries, and I had 
 nothing to say when he took up the word where I 
 broke off. 
 
208 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 " Recognising the fact that the future is the 
 creature, the mere consequence of the past ! With- 
 out what has been, nothing can be. Oh, we have 
 looked at it in every light ! At first, when she told 
 me, I was as bold, as defiant, as a man can be who 
 finds himself unjustly defamed. I said that if ever 
 we had felt reluctance or doubt in our allegiance 
 to the dead, now it was our right, our duty, to feel 
 none. We should accuse ourselves if we admitted 
 that any accusal could lie against us. The very 
 innocence of our lives demanded vindication ; we 
 ghould be recreant to our good consciences if we did 
 not treat that wretched figment of a dreaming craze as 
 it deserved. For a moment for an hour we were 
 happy in the escape which my defiance won for us, 
 and we built that future without a past which you 
 think can stand. It fell to ruin. We had deceived 
 each other, but the deceit could not last. Our very 
 indignation at the treason imputed to us by Faulk- 
 ner's dream made us examine our hearts, and ques- 
 tion each other. We could not tell when our love 
 began, and that mystery of origin which love par- 
 takes of with eternity, and which makes it seem so 
 divine a thing, became a witness against us. We 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 209 
 
 said that if we could not make sure that no thought 
 we had ever had of each other in his lifetime was 
 false to him, then we were guilty of all, and we 
 must part." 
 
 " Oh," I groaned out, "what mere madness of the 
 moon ! " 
 
 " It was not I who pronounced our sentence ; she 
 saw herself that it must be so ; it was she who sent 
 me from her." 
 
 " Yes ; only a woman could be capable of it, 
 could be such a moral hypochondriac ! But if she 
 sent you away, and you know, as you must know, 
 that in her heart she wished you to stay, why not 
 in Heaven's name go back to her 1 " 
 
 " Ah, you think I didn't go back ! You think we 
 parted once only ! We parted a hundred times ! " 
 
 " But," I said, " you will see it all differently to- 
 morrow, and you must go back to her, and whether 
 she bids you go or not, you must never leave her." 
 
 " And what sort of life would that be 1 A life of 
 defiance, of recklessness, a mere futureless present ! 
 I am a priest of the Church, and I teach submission, 
 renunciation, abnegation, here below, where there 
 can be no true happiness, for the sake of a blessed 
 O 
 
210 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 eternity. Shall I cleave to this love which we feel 
 cannot innocently be ours, and preach those things 
 with my lying tongue, while my life preaches re- 
 bellion, indulgence, self-will ? Every breath I drew 
 would be hypocrisy. What heart should I have to 
 counsel or admonish others in temptation, when I 
 
 was all rotten within myself 1 What " 
 
 " Ah, but only listen a moment ! This would 
 "be all well enough if you were guilty of what 
 you accuse yourself of ! But don't you see that in 
 this reasoning, or this raving, of yours, you have 
 violated the very first principle, the very highest 
 principle of law? You have held yourself guilty 
 till you were proven innocent, and you offer no 
 proof that you are guilty, not the least proof in 
 the world. You are only afraid that you are guilty ; 
 it amounts to that, and it amounts to nothing more ; 
 for I hold that Faulkner's crazy jealousy forms no 
 manner of case against you. I confess that though 
 I may have seemed to imply the contrary, I should 
 not feel it lawful for you to marry his widow if you 
 had ever allowed yourself to covet his wife. But 
 you never did ; the very notion of such a thing fills 
 you with such shame and horror that you accuse 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 211 
 
 yourself of it. I know that kind of infernal juggle 
 of the morbid conscience ; but I thank Heaven I 
 have my own conscience in such good training now 
 that it accuses me of nothing I haven't done : it finds 
 it has quite enough to do in dealing with the facts ; 
 I don't supply it with any fancies ! It ought to be 
 on your conscience not to leave that noble and 
 beautiful creature to be the prey of doubts and fears, 
 of if s and ans, that will blast her whole life with the 
 shame of a thief who has given up his booty to 
 escape punishment ! Suppose you look at that side 
 of it ! You say you left her because she bade you, 
 but she bade you only because she knew you believed 
 you ought to go ; and now you must go back to her 
 not only for her sake and for your sake, but in the 
 interest of human enlightenment, from the duty every 
 educated man has to resist the powers of darkness 
 that work upon our nerves through the superstitions 
 of the childhood of the world. You not only ought 
 not to let Faulkner's dream have any deterrent in- 
 fluence with you, but as you saw yourself, exactly 
 and entirely because of his dream, you ought to act 
 in defiance of it, if you have the good conscience 
 which you 've said nothing yet to prove you haven't." 
 
212 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 I saw that I had touched some points that had 
 escaped him; we talked a long time, and at last I 
 pulled out my watch in a scare, lest I had overstayed 
 my time. I jumped to my feet. " Good heavens ! 
 I Ve lost my train ! " 
 
 Nevil looked at his watch. " You have Eastern 
 time ; there 's nearly a whole hour yet. I '11 go to 
 the station with you." 
 
 I would not sit down again. " Suppose, then, we 
 let the driver take my bag, and we walk ? We can 
 talk better." 
 
 " You are very good," he said ; " I should like 
 that." 
 
 The night was dark, and we had the seclusion of 
 a room for our talk as we walked along together, 
 and in the vast depot, starred with its gas jets far 
 overhead, there was an unbroken sense of com- 
 munion. Long before we parted Nevil had con- 
 sented to revise his own conclusions, and so far to 
 take my view of the situation, as at least to see 
 Hermia again, and lay it before her. 
 
 My spirits rose with my success, and I set myself 
 to cheer the melancholy in which he assented to my 
 urgence. I understood afterward that he was yield- 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 213 
 
 ing to reason against that perverse and curious 
 apparatus which we call the conscience : and I per- 
 ceived that he was loath to have me leave him, as if 
 he were afraid to be left alone, or wished to be still 
 farther convinced. He followed me into the sleep- 
 ing-car, and there he fell into the hands of that rich 
 and cordial parishioner of his whom I remembered 
 meeting when I went down to the steamer at East 
 Boston to see Nevil off for Europe. The gentleman 
 recalled himself to my recollection, and rejoiced that 
 we were to be fellow-travellers as far as Albany. 
 
 Nevil could not hide his disappointment and vexa- 
 tion from me, though his parishioner did not see it. 
 He made us both light cigars with him in the smok- 
 ing-room, and he talked us silent. 
 
 The car began to move, and I said, " Well, good- 
 bye," and followed Nevil out upon the platform for a 
 last word. " Remember your promise ! Better get 
 off!" 
 
 " Oh, I sha'n't forget that. If I live, I will see her 
 again, and tell her all you have said. And I thank 
 
 you thank you " Clinging to my hand, he 
 
 pressed it hard, and stepped backward from the car 
 to the ground. I saw him look up at me and then 
 
214 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 he gave a wild cry, and I could feel the car grinding 
 him up against the stone jamb of the archway 
 through which the train was passing. There was a 
 hideous crashing sound from his body, and I jumped 
 at the bell rope. The train stopped ; Nevil stood 
 upright, with his face turned toward the light, and 
 a strange effect of patience in his attitude. When 
 the train slowly backed and set him free, he dropped 
 forward a crushed and lifeless lump. 
 
IX. 
 
 HERMIA died a year later, and was buried by 
 Faulkner's side ; his mother lived on for several 
 years. 
 
 It was inevitable, of course, that Hermia should 
 accept Nevil's death as a judgment ; we become so 
 bewildered before the mere meaninglessness of events 
 at times, that it is a relief to believe in a cruel and 
 unjust providence rather than in none at all. What 
 is probably true is that she sank under the strain of 
 experiences that wrung the finest and most sensitive 
 principles of her being, or, as we say, died of a 
 broken heart. 
 
 My wife and I have often talked of her and Nevil, 
 and have tried to see some way for them out of the 
 shadow of Faulkner's dream into a sunny and happy 
 life. As they are both dead, we have dealt with 
 them as arbitrarily as with the personages in a 
 fiction, and have placed and replaced them at our 
 
216 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 pleasure in the game, which they played so disas- 
 trously, so that we could bring it to a fortunate 
 close for them. We have always denied, in the 
 interest of common-sense and common justice, any 
 controlling effect to the dream itself, except through 
 their own morbid conscientiousness, their exagger- 
 ated sensibility. We know people, plenty of them, 
 who would have been no more restrained from 
 each other by it than by a cobweb across their 
 path : Hermias who would never have told their 
 Nevils of it ; Nevils who, if they had known it, 
 would have charged their Hermias on their love to 
 spurn and trample upon it. That evil dream had 
 power upon the hapless pair who succumbed to it 
 only because they were so wholly guiltless of the 
 evil imputed to them. 
 
 Our Nevil's death, violent and purely accidental 
 as it was, seemed to us a most vague and incon- 
 clusive catastrophe, and no true solution of the pro- 
 blem. Yet our Hermia being what she was, and 
 Nevil being Nevil, we saw that it was impossible 
 Faulkner's dream should not have always had power 
 upon them ; and the time came when we could re- 
 gard their death without regret. I myself think 
 
THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 217 
 
 that if Nevil had seen Hermia again, as he promised 
 me, it would have been only to renew in her and in 
 himself their strength for renunciation ; and I have 
 sometimes imagined a sort of dramatic friendship 
 taking the place of their love, and uniting their lives 
 in good works, or something of that kind. But I 
 have not been satisfied with this conception ; it is 
 too like what I have found carried out in some very 
 romantic novels ; and my wife has always insisted 
 that if they had met again, they would have married 
 and been unhappy. She insists that they could not 
 have kept their self-respect and their perfect honour 
 for each other if they had married. But this again 
 seems abominably unfair : that they should suffer so 
 for no wrong ; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some 
 end unknown to the sufferer or the witnesses, and 
 no anguish is wasted, as that friend of Nevil's be- 
 lieved. We must come to some such conclusion, or 
 else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say 
 that they were all three destined to undergo what 
 they underwent, and that what happened to them 
 was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since 
 no wrong had been done, but simply fate. 
 
 Of course there is always the human possibility 
 
218 THE SHADOW OF A DREAM. 
 
 that the dream was a divination of facts ; that 
 Hermia and Nevil were really in love while Faulk- 
 ner lived, and were untrue to him in their hearts, 
 which are the fountains of potential good and 
 evil ; but knowing them to be what they were, 
 we have never admitted this hypothesis for a 
 moment. For any one to do so, my wife says, 
 would be to confess himself worse than Faulkner 
 dreamed them to be. She does not permit it to be 
 said, or even suggested, that our feelings are not at 
 our bidding, and that there is no sin where there 
 has been no sinning. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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