Chapter XIX: The Dream

Lady Horatia did not afterwards express any disapprobation at my dancing with him so often; though the day after the Duke of ----’s, she had said it was quite wrong to dance twice with the same person. She told me that Sir Alfred was what everybody considered too fine to dance with any one but the most decided beauty of the season; and she was therefore glad that no one could say the Countess had cut me out.

“Then it was not such a great honour to be danced with by the Marquis or Duke as with Sir Alfred?”

“No; because he is the most fashionable man in London. He carries everything before him.”

“And he said that I could cure him of his passion for play,” I thought with delight.

Lady Horatia was not introduced to the beautiful Countess, although I saw the sprightly fairy wished to make her acquaintance. I think she asked Sir Alfred to introduce her; and I found afterwards that Lady Horatia had civilly prevented him, and several people, from doing so.

“I will not know her if I can help it,” said Lady Horatia, as we drove home; “and I advised the Duke of D---- not to invite her to his ball--your first ball. She is a powerful little creature, and I daresay will make her way in spite of me; and of course she will never forgive me for keeping her out of D---- House, which exclusion shuts the doors of many others to her; and I am more glad than ever that I did so, for I saw to-night what a mischievous creature she must be. How I pity that most interesting husband of hers, who is too unhappy and indifferent to be jealous of her. I suppose she will never like to live at that beautiful old place, Castle Hill? Yet it is a spot which ought to revive the most depressed or broken-hearted--such views over the extensive park; and the house the most perfect specimen of the Tudor and Elizabethan architecture in England, having the remains of an old castle joined on to it, with secret passages and mysterious trap-doors, and priests’ hiding-holes--every kind of romantic association; for it illustrates the history of the times almost from the Conquest down to the last century.”

“How I should like to see it!”

“Perhaps you will some day, for it is only ten miles from my old friend’s the Duchess of Dromoland, and she will tell you of all the romantic stories attached to it, and of the beautiful ghost which is said to appear once in every century--a lady of King Edward the Third’s time, who was built up in the wall by a jealous husband. Count Rossi, as well as his present wife, is a descendant of hers, and I fancied his handsome and most melancholy face very like the picture I saw at Castle Hill of the lovely ghost, Lady Jane.”

“And was his first intended wife descended from that old family?--for she was his first cousin, I fancy.”

“Yes, and by an elder branch, for she had the first claim, and was heiress to all that property, and her cousin Cunigunda, Count Rossi’s present wife, has succeeded as next of kin. Their grandmother was a Roland, and the beautiful Dorina was daughter of her eldest son. I learnt all this from Lady Charlotte Crofton: she always knows everybody’s history, and is very good-natured, yet she too has a very bad opinion of that wondrous Countess.”

So had I, and her mischievous eyes, which seemed to have never ceased looking at me all the evening, haunted me still with a strange mixture of dread and horror.

In fact, the recollection of all she did and looked then, seemed to absorb my mind to the exclusion even of Sir Alfred; and when, at last, I went to sleep, I had a most painfully vivid dream about her. Sir Alfred was singing “Amor possente nome” with me, and I thought she came and, with icy touch, drove me away, while Sir Alfred totally disappeared; and I saw Carlo rise out of a kind of glowing fiery furnace, and gaze at me with reproachful eyes. Then the Countess covered me with a kind of flaming veil, through which I dimly saw him sinking down into a yawning abyss of raging fire, while her still icy fingers seemed to press my throat till I became unconscious.

At last I woke, with a feeling of indescribable horror, and with the full conviction that she was the cause of Carlo’s apparent coldness; and a new feeling of bitter self-reproach at my desertion of him gained firm possession of me.

Could he have fallen under her fatal spell? In one of his letters he said he was going to Venice; and now I remembered that Count Rossi has an old place there. Could that be the reason of his silence, and the apparent coldness of his last letter? Poor Carlo! could I ever love him again as I did before? Did he ever excite the wild kind of entrancing joy that the presence of Sir Alfred gave me?

I was obliged to confess that he had not. Then why should I resent his desertion in the perverse manner I had done? Sir Alfred I was forbidden to care for; even his own words that evening--his absent manner, after saying that I could cure him--everything seemed to warn me that I must not.

Was there ever such a strange fate as mine; and why did he fascinate me? why did the very idea of him fill me with such intense delight? So absorbed was I in these deep questionings that hours passed after I woke, and I never stirred till I heard some one knocking at the door. It was twelve o’clock. Ashamed of my apparent laziness, I hurried up, though still bewildered with the startling surmises and self-reproach the strange dream had caused.