第43章

Insensibly the legend of Aldobrand Oldenbuck, and his mysterious visits to the inmates of the chamber, awoke in his mind, and with it, as we often feel in dreams, an anxious and fearful expectation, which seldom fails instantly to summon up before our mind's eye the object of our fear.Brighter sparkles of light flashed from the chimney, with such intense brilliancy as to enlighten all the room.The tapestry waved wildly on the wall, till its dusky forms seemed to become animated.The hunters blew their horns--the stag seemed to fly, the boar to resist, and the hounds to assail the one and pursue the other;the cry of deer, mangled by throttling dogs--the shouts of men, and the clatter of horses' hoofs, seemed at once to surround him--while every group pursued, with all the fury of the chase, the employment in which the artist had represented them as engaged.Lovel looked on this strange scene devoid of wonder (which seldom intrudes itself upon the sleeping fancy), but with an anxious sensation of awful fear.At length an individual figure among the tissued huntsmen, as he gazed upon them more fixedly, seemed to leave the arras and to approach the bed of the slumberer.As he drew near, his figure appeared to alter.His bugle-horn became a brazen clasped volume; his hunting-cap changed to such a furred head-gear as graces the burgomasters of Rembrandt; his Flemish garb remained but his features, no longer agitated with the fury of the chase, were changed to such a state of awful and stern composure, as might best portray the first proprietor of Monkbarns, such as he had been described to Lovel by his descendants in the course of the preceding evening.As this metamorphosis took place, the hubbub among the other personages in the arras disappeared from the imagination of the dreamer, which was now exclusively bent on the single figure before him.Lovel strove to interrogate this awful person in the form of exorcism proper for the occasion; but his tongue, as is usual in frightful dreams, refused its office, and clung, palsied, to the roof of his mouth.Aldobrand held up his finger, as if to impose silence upon the guest who had intruded on his apartment, and began deliberately to unclasp the venerable, volume which occupied his left hand.When it was unfolded, he turned over the leaves hastily for a short space, and then raising his figure to its full dimensions, and holding the book aloft in his left hand, pointed to a passage in the page which he thus displayed.Although the language was unknown to our dreamer, his eye and attention were both strongly caught by the line which the figure seemed thus to press upon his notice, the words of which appeared to blaze with a supernatural light, and remained riveted upon has memory.As the vision shut his volume, a strain of delightful music seemed to fill the apartment--Lovel started, and became completely awake.The music, however, was still in his ears, nor ceased till he could distinctly follow the measure of an old Scottish tune.