“I am not ill,” I said.  “Speak to me again.”

She was pressing my hand now, I saw her bending over me, I felt her hair as it brushed my face.  She spoke again.  There was a tremor in her voice, and to that alone I listened.  The words were decisive, of command, and with them some sense as of a haven near came to me.  Another voice answered in a strange tongue, saying seemingly:—­

“Oui, Madame—­male couri—­bon dje—­male couri!”

I heard the doors close, and the sound of footsteps running and dying along the banquette, and after that my shoulders were raised and something wrapped about them.  Then stillness again, the stillness that comes between waking and sleeping, between pain and calm.  And at times when I felt her hand fall into mine or press against my brow, the pain seemed more endurable.  After that I recall being lifted, being borne along.  I opened my eyes once and saw, above a tile-crowned wall, the moon all yellow and distorted in the sky.  Then a gate clicked, dungeon blackness, half-light again, ascent, oblivion.

CHAPTER XII

VISIONS, AND AN AWAKENING

I have still sharp memories of the tortures of that illness, though it befell so long ago.  At times, when my mind was gone from me, I cried out I know not what of jargon, of sentiment, of the horrors I had beheld in my life.  I lived again the pleasant scenes, warped and burlesqued almost beyond cognizance, and the tragedies were magnified a hundred fold.  Thus it would be:  on the low, white ceiling five cracks came together, and that was a device.  And the device would take on color, red-bronze like the sumach in the autumn and streaks of vermilion, and two glowing coals that were eyes, and above them eagles’ feathers, and the cracks became bramble bushes.  I was behind the log, and at times I started and knew that it was a hideous dream, and again Polly Ann was clutching me and praying me to hold back, and I broke from her and splashed over the slippery limestone bed of the creek to fight single-handed.  Through all the fearful struggle I heard her calling me piteously to come back to her.  When the brute got me under water I could not hear her, but her voice came back suddenly (as when a door opens) and it was like the wind singing in the poplars.  Was it Polly Ann’s voice?

Again, I sat with Nick under the trees on the lawn at Temple Bow, and the world was dark with the coming storm.  I knew and he knew that the storm was brewing that I might be thrust out into it.  And then in the blackness, when the air was filled with all the fair things of the earth torn asunder, a beautiful woman came through the noise and the fury, and we ran to her and clung to her skirts, thinking we had found safety.  But she thrust us forth into the blackness with a smile, as though she were flinging papers out of the window.  She, too, grew out of the design in the cracks of the ceiling, and a greater fear seized me at sight of her features than when the red face came out of the brambles.