Many Kingdoms | Page 3

all. It was almost a year later when, one night, lying half awake, he saw again the fine, transparent, screen- like veil enshroud the objects in his bedroom. It was winter, and a great log was burning in the large fireplace. He had tried to choke the flames with ashes before he went to bed, but the wood had blazed up again and he had lain quiet, awaiting slumber and blinking indifferently at the light. His bedroom overlooked Fifth Avenue. There was a large club-house just opposite his house, and cabs and carriages still came and went. Varick heard the slam of carriage doors, the click of horses' hoofs on the wet asphalt, and congratulated himself on the common-sense which had inspired him to go to bed at eleven instead of joining the festive throng across the street. He had dutifully spent the morning in his father's offices, and then, with a warming sense of virtue, had run out of town for a late luncheon and a trial of hunters. To-night he was pleasantly tired, but not drowsy. When the curtain fell before his surroundings, and he saw them melting imperceptibly into others quite foreign to them, he at once recalled the similar experience of the year before. With a little quickening of his steady heart-beats, he awaited developments.
Yes, here was the old town, with its red roofs, its quaint architecture, its crowded, narrow, picturesque streets. But this time they seemed almost deserted, and the whole effect of the place was bleak and dreary. The leaves had dropped from the trees, the flowers had faded, the vines that covered the cottage walls were brown and bare. He was pleasantly conscious of the warmth of a sable-lined coat he had brought from Russia two years before. He thrust his gloved hands deep into its capacious pockets and walked on, his eyes turning to right and left as he went. At intervals he saw a bulky masculine figure, queerly dressed, turn a corner or enter a house. Once or twice one came his way and passed him, but no one looked at him or spoke. For a moment Varick was tempted to knock at one of the inhospitably closed doors and ask for information and directions, but something--he did not know what--restrained him.
When she appeared it was as suddenly as she had come before, with no warning, no approach. She was at his elbow--a bewitching thing of furs and feminine beauty, French millinery and cordiality. She held out her small hand with a fine camaraderie.
"Is it not nice?" she asked at once. "I was afraid I should arrive first and have to wait alone. I would not have liked that."
He held her hand close, looking down at her from his great height, his gray eyes shining into hers.
"Then you knew--you were coming?" he asked, slowly.
"Not until the moment before I came. But when I saw the curtain fall-- "
"You saw that, too? A thin, gauzy thing, like a transparency?"
"Yes."
He relapsed into silence for a moment, as he unconsciously adapted his stride to hers, and they walked on together as naturally as if it were an every-day occurrence.
"What do you make of it all?" he at length asked.
She shrugged her shoulders with a little foreign gesture which seemed to him, even then, very characteristic.
"I do not know. It frightened me--a little--at first. Now it does not, for it always ends and I awake--at home."
"Where is that?"
She hesitated.
"I may not tell you," she said, slowly. "I do not quite know why, but I may not. Possibly you may know some time. You, I think, are an American."
He stared hard at her, his smooth face taking on a strangely solemn expression.
"You mean to say," he persisted, "that this is all a dream--that you and I, instead of being here, are really asleep somewhere, on different continents?"
She nodded.
"We are asleep," she said, "on different continents, as you say. Whether we are dreaming or whether our two souls are taking a little excursion through space--oh, who shall say? Who can question the wonderful things which happen in this most wonderful world? I have ceased to question, but I have also ceased to fear."
He made no reply. Somewhere, in the back of his head, lay fear--a very definite, paralyzing fear--that something was wrong with him or with her or with them both. Instead of being in the neutral border-land of dreams, had he not perhaps passed the tragic line dividing the normal mind from the insane? She seemed to read his thoughts, and her manner became more gentle, almost tender.
"Is it so very dreadful?" she asked, softly. "We are together, you know, my friend. Would it not be worse to wander about alone?"
With a great effort he pulled himself together.
"Infinitely," he said, with gratifying conviction. "And you're--you're a