Tales for Christmas Eve — Key Ideas to Explore

off her ring twenty times a day to admire its bright thickness; still laughs when she hears herself called “Madame.” Three days ago, we kissed all our friends, and left them to make themselves ill on our cake, and criticise our bridal behaviour, and now we are at Brussels, she and I, feeling oddly, joyfully free from any chaperone. We have been mildly sight-seeing--very mildly, most people would say, but we have resolved not to take our pleasure with the railway speed of Americans, or the hasty sadness of our fellow Britons. Slowly and gaily we have been taking ours. To-day we have been to visit Wiertz’s pictures. Have you ever seen them, oh reader? They are known to comparatively few people, but if you have a taste for the unearthly terrible--if you wish to sup full of horrors, hasten thither. We have been peering through the appointed peep-hole at the horrible cholera picture--the man buried alive by mistake, pushing up the lid of his coffin, and stretching a ghastly face and livid hands out of his winding sheet towards you, while awful grey-blue coffins are piled around, and noisome toads and giant spiders crawl damply about. On first seeing it, I have reproached myself for bringing one of so nervous a temperament as Elizabeth to see so haunting and hideous a spectacle; but she is less impressed than I expected--less impressed than I myself am.

“He is very lucky to be able to get his lid up,” she says, with a half-laugh; “we should find it hard work to burst our brass nails, should not we? When you bury me, dear, fasten me down very slightly, in case there may be some mistake.”

And now all the long and quiet July evening we have been prowling together about the streets. Brussels is the town of towns for _flâner_-ing--have been flattening our noses against the shop windows, and making each other imaginary presents. Elizabeth has not confined herself to imagination, however; she has made me buy her a little bonnet with feathers--“in order to look married,” as she says, and the result is such a delicious picture of a child playing at being grown up, having practised a theft on its mother’s wardrobe, that for the last two hours I have been in a foolish ecstasy of love and laughter over her and it. We are at the “Bellevue,” and have a fine suite of rooms, _au premier_, evidently specially devoted to the English, to the gratification of whose well-known loyalty the Prince and Princess of Wales are simpering from the walls. Is there any one in the three kingdoms who knows his own face as well as he knows the faces of Albert Victor and Alexandra? The long evening has at last slidden into night--night far advanced--night melting into earliest day. All Brussels is asleep. One moment ago I also was asleep, soundly as any log. What is it that has made me take this sudden, headlong plunge out of sleep into wakefulness? Who is it that is clutching at and calling upon me? What is it that is making me struggle mistily up into a sitting posture, and try to revive my sleep-numbed senses? A summer night is never wholly dark; by the half light that steals through the closed _persiennes_ and open windows I see my wife standing beside my bed; the extremity of terror on her face, and her fingers digging themselves with painful tenacity into my arm.

“Tighter, tighter!” she is crying, wildly. “What are you thinking of? You are letting me go!”

“Good heavens!” say I, rubbing my eyes, while my muddy brain grows a trifle clearer. “What is it? What has happened? Have you had a nightmare?”

“You saw him,” she says, with a sort of sobbing breathlessness; “you know you did! You saw him as well as I.”

“I!” cry I, incredulously--“not I. Till this second I have been fast asleep. _I_ saw nothing.”

“You did!” she cries, passionately. “You know you did. Why do you deny it? You were as frightened as I?”

“As I live,” I answer, solemnly, “I know no more than the dead what you are talking about; till you woke me by calling me and catching hold of me, I was as sound asleep as the seven sleepers.”

“Is it possible that it can have been a _dream_?” she says, with a long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her hands. “But no--in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was here--_here_--on that bed, and he stood _there_,” pointing with her forefinger, “just _there_, between the foot of it and the window!”