the port wine hasn’t agreed with me; but I don’t feel it now.’
‘I never knew this port disagree with anyone: I don’t think it can be that,’ said Mr Bristley. ‘Send it on, Smeeth,—no? Well, if nobody’ll have any more, shall we go to coffee in the drawing-room?’
Shortly afterwards the vicar had an opportunity of speaking to his niece alone.
‘It’s unlucky, Lesbie dear, that you should have an attack of vertigo to-day. But just at your age little things of that sort needn’t alarm one.’
‘It was hardly what you’d call vertigo, Uncle Spines,—rather a sort of trance; perhaps I inherit the disposition from mamma. What happened exactly was this: Your last words, about a day of reckoning, had the effect of bringing before me a part of my mother’s dream, as if I were dreaming it myself. I seemed to hear the notes of bugles mingled with heavy rolling thunder, and a curious dropping noise as if a cataract of loose stones kept slipping over a precipice. I didn’t see anything horrid; all I saw was a desolate hill with a tower like a lighthouse on its top, and a volume of white smoke, such as would come from a number of weed-heaps burning on a mild moist day; then there came a rainbow over all, and the noise ceased. I suppose I must have been what the mesmerists call en rapport with the past state of my mother’s mind when she had that awful vision. I wonder if she herself was thinking about it at the moment. I don’t like to ask her, because I want her to forget all about it; and, after all, my bit of a phantasm was a trifle to hers, poor darling mamma!’
‘Don’t like these women’s visions at all,’ Mr Bristley muttered to himself, looking deeply concerned. ‘Come, Lesbia,’ he said, turning back toward the dining-room, ‘it’s plain you're getting out of sorts. Come and correct the port with a whitewash of Madeira, eh?’
