Then she remembered the horrible vision of the night, and she looked
anxiously towards the door of the vault. It seemed fast as ever. She got
up and went to look at it. It was fast, the bars firmly bedded in the
solid masonry, as they had been before.
What then had been the vision? She shuddered to think of it. Her first
impulse was now to arouse her husband and tell him what had happened.
But her tenderness for him pleaded with her to forbear.
"He sleeps well, poor Lyon! let him sleep," she said, and she threw a
shawl around her shoulders, and went out of the chapel to get a breath
of the fresh morning air.
She had to pass among the gray old gravestones lying deep in the
bright-colored dew-spangled brushwood. As she picked her way past them,
she suddenly stopped and screamed.
Captain Pendleton was lying prostrate, like a dead man at the foot of an
old tree!
With a strong effort of the will, she controlled herself sufficiently to
enable her to approach and examine him. He was not dead, as she had at
first supposed; but he was in a very death-like sleep.
She arose to her feet, and clasped her forehead with both hands while
she tried to think. What could these things mean? The unnatural
exhilaration of their little party on the previous evening; the powerful
reaction that prostrated them all in heavy stupor or dreamless sleep,
that had lasted some fifteen hours; the ghastly procession she had seen
issue from the open door of the old vault, and march slowly down the
east wall of the church, past all the gothic windows, and disappear
through the front door; the spell that had so deeply bound her own
faculties, that she had neither the power nor the will to call out;
their visitor overtaken by sleep while on his way to mount his horse,
and now lying prostrate among the gravestones? What could all these
things mean?
She could not imagine.
However much she might have wished to spare her husband's rest up to
this moment, she felt that she must arouse him now. She hurried back
into the church, and went up to the little couch and looked at Lyon.
He was moving restlessly, and muttering sadly in his sleep. And now she
felt less reluctance to wake him from his troubled dream. She shook him
gently, and called him.
He opened his eyes, gazed at her, arose up in a sitting posture, and
stared around for a moment, and then seeing his wife, exclaimed: "Oh! is it you, Sybil? What is this? the chapel seems to be turned
around." And he gazed again at the western windows, where the sun was
shining, and which he mistook for the eastern, supposing the time to be
morning.