CHAPTER XXI 279
CHAPTER XXI
Presentiments are strange things ! and so are sympathies ; and so are signs ; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key . I never laughed at presentiments in my life , because I have had strange ones of my own . Sympathies , I believe , exist ( for instance , between far-distant , long-absent , wholly estranged relatives asserting , notwithstanding their alienation , the unity of the source to which each traces his origin ) whose workings baffle mortal comprehension . And signs , for aught we know , may be but the sympathies of Nature with man .
When I was a little girl , only six years old , I one night heard Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child ; and that to dream of children was a sure sign of trouble , either to one ' s self or one ' s kin . The saying might have worn out of my memory , had not a circumstance immediately followed which served indelibly to fix it there . The next day Bessie was sent for home to the deathbed of her little sister .
Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident ; for during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of an infant , which I sometimes hushed in my arms , sometimes dandled on my knee , sometimes watched playing with daisies on a lawn , or again , dabbling its hands in running water . It was a wailing child this night , and a laughing one the next : now it nestled close to me , and now it ran from me ; but whatever mood the apparition evinced , whatever aspect it wore , it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber .
I did not like this iteration of one idea -- this strange recurrence of one image , and I grew nervous as bedtime approached and the hour of the vision drew near . It was from companionship with this baby-phantom I had been roused on that moonlight night when I heard the cry ; and it was on the afternoon of the day following I was summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs . Fairfax ' s room . On repairing thither , I found a man waiting for me , having the appearance of a gentleman ' s servant : he was dressed in deep mourning , and the hat he held in his hand