The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
The Haunting Woman
MR. LAW had endured even more than a weathered woodsman could have borne without suffering. Forty-eight hours of such heavy woods-walking as he had put in to escape the fire would have served to prostrate almost any man; add to this (ignoring a dozen other mental, nervous, and physical strains) the fact that he had been half-drowned. …. He experienced fever, delirium, then blank slumbers of exhaustion.
He awoke at night, unaware that thirty-six hours had passed since his fall. This last, however, and events that had gone before, he recalled with tolerable clearness. Other memories, more vague, of gentle hands, of a face by turns an angel's and a dear woman's, troubled him even less materially. He was sane enough to know he had been out of his head, and since it seemed he had been saved and cared for, he found no reason to quarrel with present circumstances.
With some difficulty, from a dry throat, he whispered: "Water …"
In response he heard some one move over a creaking floor. A sulphur match spluttered. A candle caught fire, silhouetting—illusion, of course!—the figure of a woman. Water splashed. Water splashed noisily. Alan became aware of some one who stood at his side, one hand offering a glass, the other gently raising his head that he might drink.
Draining the glass, he breathed his thanks and sank back, retaining his grasp on the wrist of that unreal hand. The hallucination went so far as to say, in a woman's soft accents:
"You are better, Alan?"
He sighed incredulously: "Rose!"
The voice responded, "Yes!" Then the perfume of roses grew still more strong, and a miracle came to pass: for Mr. Law, who realized poignantly that all this was sheer nonsense, distinctly felt lips like velvet caress his forehead.
He closed his eyes, tightened his grasp on that hand of phantasy, and muttered.
The voice asked: "What is it, dear?"
He responded; "Delirium. … But I like it. … Let me rave!"
Then again he slept.