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JOHN IS TAKEN ILL.
In the middle of the night he woke with a start, ill enough to feel that
he was going to be worse. His head throbbed; the room seemed turning
round with him, and when it settled, he saw strange shapes in it. A
few rays of the sinking moon had got in between the curtains of one
of the windows, and had waked up everything! The furniture looked
odd--unpleasantly odd. Something unnatural, or at least unearthly, must
be near him! The room was an old-fashioned one, in thorough keeping with
the age of the house--the very haunt for a ghost, but he had heard of no
ghost in that room! He got up to get himself some water, and drew the
curtains aside. He could have been in no thraldom to an apprehensive
imagination; for what man, with a brooding terror couched in him, would,
in the middle of the night, let in the moon? To such a passion, she is
worse than the deepest darkness, especially when going down, as she was
then, with the weary look she gets by the time her work is about over,
and she has long been forsaken of the poor mortals for whom she has so
often to be up and shining all night. He poured himself some water and
drank it, but thought it did not taste nice. Then he turned to the
window, and looked out.
The house was in a large park. Its few trees served mainly to show how
wide the unbroken spaces of grass. Before the house, motionless as a
statue, stood a great gray horse with hanging neck, his shadow stretched
in mighty grotesque behind him, and on his back the very effigy of my
uncle, motionless too as marble. The horse stood sidewise to the house,
but the face of his rider was turned toward it, as if scanning its
windows in the dying glitter of the moon. John thought he heard a cry
somewhere, and went to his door, but, listening hard, heard nothing. When
he looked again from the window, the apparition seemed fainter, and
farther away, though neither horse nor rider had changed posture. He
rubbed his eyes to see more plainly, could no longer distinguish the
appearance, and went back to bed. In the morning he was in a high
fever--unconscious save of restless discomfort and undefined trouble.
He learned afterward from the housekeeper, that his mother herself nursed
him, but he would take neither food nor medicine from her hand. No doctor
was sent for. John thought, and I cannot but think, that the water in his
bottle had to do with the sudden illness. His mother may have merely
wished to prevent him from coming to me; but, for the time at least, the
conviction had got possession of him, that she was attempting his life.
He may have argued in semi conscious moments, that she would not scruple
to take again what she was capable of imagining she had given. Her
attentions, however, may have arisen from alarm at seeing him worse than
she had intended to make him, and desire to counteract what she had done.
For several days he was prostrate with extreme exhaustion. Necessarily, I
knew nothing of this; neither was I, notwithstanding my more than doubt
of his mother, in any immediate dread of what she might do. The cessation
of his visits could, of course, cause me no anxiety, seeing it was
thoroughly understood between us that we were not at liberty to meet.
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