I opened
the door softly, and entered without waking Jacob, who lay asleep with
his white face upward. He was still, and again bathed in sweat. I tried
to imagine what visions were passing before those closed eyes which
could bring with them the misery and woe which were stamped on the
face, but fancy failed me, and I waited for the awakening. It came
suddenly, and in a fashion which touched me to the quick, for the
hollow groan that broke from the man’s white lips as he half arose and
sank back was manifestly the realisation or completion of some train of
thought which had gone before. “If this be dreaming,” said I to myself, “then it must be based on some
very terrible reality. What can have been that unhappy fact that he
spoke of?”

While I thus spoke, he realised that I was with him. It struck me as
strange that he had no period of that doubt as to whether dream or
reality surrounded him which commonly marks an expected environment of
waking men. With a positive cry of joy, he seized my hand and held it
in his two wet, trembling hands, as a frightened child clings on to
someone whom it loves. I tried to soothe him:

“There, there! it is all right. I have come to stay with you tonight,
and together we will try to fight this evil dream.” He let go my hand
suddenly, and sank back on his bed and covered his eyes with his hands. “Fight it?—the evil dream! Ah! no, sir, no! No mortal power can fight
that dream, for it comes from God—and is burned in here;” and he beat
upon his forehead. Then he went on:

“It is the same dream, ever the same, and yet it grows in its power to
torture me every time it comes.”

“What is the dream?” I asked, thinking that the speaking of it might
give him some relief, but he shrank away from me, and after a long
pause said:

“No, I had better not tell it. It may not come again.”

There was manifestly something to conceal from me—something that lay
behind the dream, so I answered:

“All right. I hope you have seen the last of it. But if it should come
again, you will tell me, will you not? I ask, not out of curiosity, but
because I think it may relieve you to speak.” He answered with what I
thought was almost an undue amount of solemnity:

“If it comes again, I shall tell you all.”

Then I tried to get his mind away from the subject to more mundane
things, so I produced supper, and made him share it with me, including
the contents of the flask. After a little he braced up, and when I lit
my cigar, having given him another, we smoked a full hour, and talked
of many things. Little by little the comfort of his body stole over his
mind, and I could see sleep laying her gentle hands on his eyelids. He
felt it, too, and told me that now he felt all right, and I might
safely leave him; but I told him that, right or wrong, I was going to
see in the daylight. So I lit my other candle, and began to read as he
fell asleep. By degrees I got interested in my book, so interested that presently I
was startled by its dropping out of my hands. I looked and saw that
Jacob was still asleep, and I was rejoiced to see that there was on his
face a look of unwonted happiness, while his lips seemed to move with
unspoken words. Then I turned to my work again, and again woke, but
this time to feel chilled to my very marrow by hearing the voice from
the bed beside me:

“Not with those red hands! Never! never!” On looking at him, I found
that he was still asleep. He woke, however, in an instant, and did not
seem surprised to see me; there was again that strange apathy as to his
surroundings. Then I said:

“Settle, tell me your dream. You may speak freely, for I shall hold
your confidence sacred. While we both live I shall never mention what
you may choose to tell me.”

He replied:

“I said I would; but I had better tell you first what goes before the
dream, that you may understand. I was a schoolmaster when I was a very
young man; it was only a parish school in a little village in the West
Country. No need to mention any names. Better not. I was engaged to be
married to a young girl whom I loved and almost reverenced. It was the
old story. While we were waiting for the time when we could afford to
set up house together, another man came along. He was nearly as young
as I was, and handsome, and a gentleman, with all a gentleman’s
attractive ways for a woman of our class. He would go fishing, and she
would meet him while I was at my work in school. I reasoned with her
and implored her to give him up. I offered to get married at once and
go away and begin the world in a strange country; but she would not
listen to anything I could say, and I could see that she was infatuated
with him. Then I took it on myself to meet the man and ask him to deal
well with the girl, for I thought he might mean honestly by her, so
that there might be no talk or chance of talk on the part of others. I
went where I should meet him with none by, and we met!” Here Jacob
Settle had to pause, for something seemed to rise in his throat, and he
almost gasped for breath. Then he went on:

“Sir, as God is above us, there was no selfish thought in my heart that
day, I loved my pretty Mabel too well to be content with a part of her
love, and I had thought of my own unhappiness too often not to have
come to realise that, whatever might come to her, my hope was gone. He
was insolent to me—you, sir, who are a gentleman, cannot know, perhaps,
how galling can be the insolence of one who is above you in station—but
I bore with that. I implored him to deal well with the girl, for what
might be only a pastime of an idle hour with him might be the breaking
of her heart. For I never had a thought of her truth, or that the worst
of harm could come to her—it was only the unhappiness to her heart I
feared. But when I asked him when he intended to marry her his laughter
galled me so that I lost my temper and told him that I would not stand
by and see her life made unhappy. Then he grew angry too, and in his
anger said such cruel things of her that then and there I swore he
should not live to do her harm. God knows how it came about, for in
such moments of passion it is hard to remember the steps from a word to
a blow, but I found myself standing over his dead body, with my hands
crimson with the blood that welled from his torn throat. We were alone
and he was a stranger, with none of his kin to seek for him and murder
does not always out—not all at once. His bones may be whitening still,
for all I know, in the pool of the river where I left him. No one
suspected his absence, or why it was, except my poor Mabel, and she
dared not speak. But it was all in vain, for when I came back again
after an absence of months—for I could not live in the place—I learned
that her shame had come and that she had died in it.