Devereux's Dream

"Devereux's Dream" is a supernatural mystery by Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1853. The novel follows the titular character, Edward Devereux, who confronts his own past and emerging fears through a series of haunting dreams. As Devereux navigates his nightmares, he becomes entwined in a web of intrigue, love, and spectral encounters, exploring themes of memory, identity, and the uncanny. Le Fanu's atmospheric prose and psychological depth make this work a notable example of Victorian Gothic fiction.

• Mystery

								
I give you this story only at second-hand; but you have it in
substance--and he wasted few words over it--as Paul Devereux told it me.

It was not the only queer story he could have told about himself if he
had chosen, by a good many, I should say. Paul's life had been an
eminently unconventional one: the man's face certified to that--hard,
bronzed, war-worn, seamed and scarred with strange battle-marks--the
face of a man who had dared and done most things.

It was not his custom to speak much of what he had done, however.
Probably only because he and I were little likely to meet again that he
told me this I am free to tell you now.

We had come across one another for the first time for years that
afternoon on the Italian Boulevart. Paul had landed a couple of weeks
previously at Marseilles from a long yacht-cruise in southern waters,
the monotony of which we heard had been agreeably diversified by a
little pirate-hunting and slaver-chasing--the evil tongues called it
piracy and slave-running; and certainly Devereux was quite equal to
either métier; and he was about starting on a promising little
filibustering expedition across the Atlantic, where the chances were he
would be shot, and the certainty was that he would be starved. So
perhaps he felt inclined to be a trifle more communicative than usual,
as we sat late that night over a blazing pyre of logs and in a cloud of
Cavendish. At all events he was, and after this fashion.

I forget now exactly how the subject was led up to. Expression of some
philosophic incredulity on my part regarding certain matters, followed
by a ten-minutes' silence on his side pregnant with unwonted words to
come--that was it, perhaps. At last he said, more to himself, it seemed,
than to me:

"'Such stuff as dreams are made of.' Well, who knows? You're a Sadducee,
Bertie; you call this sort of thing, politely, indigestion. Perhaps
you're right. But yet I had a queer dream once."

"Not unlikely," I assented.

"You're wrong; I never dream, as a rule. But, as I say, I had a queer
dream once; and queer because it came literally true three years
afterward."

"Queer indeed, Paul."

"Happens to be true. What's queerer still, my dream was the means of my
finding a man I owed a long score, and a heavy one, and of my paying him
in full."

"Bad for the payee!" I thought.

Paul's face had grown terribly eloquent as he spoke those last words. On
a sudden the expression of it changed--another memory was stirring in
him. Wonderfully tender the fierce eyes grew; wonderfully tender the
faint, sad smile, that was like sunshine on storm-scathed granite. That
smile transfigured the man before me.

"Ah, poor child--poor Lucille!" I heard him mutter.

That was it, was it? So I let him be. Presently he lifted his head. If
he had let himself get the least thing out of hand for a moment, he had
got back his self-mastery the next.

"I'll tell you that queer story, Bertie, if you like," he said.

The proposition was flatteringly unusual, but the voice was quite his
own.

"Somehow I'd sooner talk than think about--her," he went on after a
pause.

I nodded. He might talk about this, you see, but I couldn't. He began
with a question--an odd one:

"Did you ever hear I'd been married?"

Paul Devereux and a wife had always seemed and been to me a most
unheard-of conjunction. So I laconically said:

"No."

"Well, I was once, years ago. She was my wife--that child--for a week.
And then----"

I easily filled up the pause; but, as it happened, I filled it up
wrongly; for he added:

"And then she was murdered."

I was not unused to our Paul's stony style of talk; but this last
sentence was sufficiently startling.

"Eh?"

"Murdered--in her sleep. They never found the man who did it either,
though I had Durbec and all the Rue de Jérusalem at work. But I forgave
them that, for I found the man myself, and killed him."

He was filling his pipe again as he told me this, and he perhaps rammed
the Cavendish in a little tighter, but that was all. The thing was a
matter of course; I knew my Paul, well enough to know that. Of course he
killed him.

"Mind you," he continued, kindling the black brûle-gueule the
while--"mind you, I'd never seen this man before, never known of his
existence, except in a way that--however, it was this way."

He let his grizzled head drop back on the cushions of his chair, and his
eyes seemed to see the queer story he was telling enacted once more
before him in the red hollows of the fire.

"As I said, it was years ago. I was waiting here in Paris for some
fellows who were to join me in a campaign we'd arranged against the
African big game. I never was more fit for anything of that sort than I
was then. I only tell you this to show you that the thing can't be
accounted for by my nerves having been out of order at all.

"Well: I was dining alone that day, at the Café Anglais. It was late
when I sat down to my dinner in the little salon as usual. Only two
other men were still lingering over theirs. All the time they stayed
they bored me so persistently with some confounded story of a murder
they were discussing, that I was once or twice more than half-inclined
to tell them so. At last, though, they went away.

"But their talk kept buzzing abominably in my head. When the waiter
brought me the evening paper, the first thing that caught my eye was a
circumstantial account of the probable way the fellow did his murder.
I say probable, for they never caught him; and, as you will see
directly, they could only suppose how it occurred.

"It seemed that a well-known Paris banker, who was ascertained beyond
doubt to have left one station alive and well, and with a couple of
hundred thousand francs in a leathern sac under his seat, arrived at
the next station the train stopped at with his throat cut and minus
all his money, except a few bank-notes to no great amount, which the
assassin had been wise enough to leave behind him. The train was a night
express on one of the southern lines; the banker travelled quite alone,
in a first-class carriage; and the murder must have taken place between
midnight and 1 A.M. next morning. The newspapers supposed--rightly
enough, I think--that the murderer must have entered the carriage from
without, stabbed his victim in his sleep--there were no signs of any
struggle--opened the sac, taken what he wanted, and retreated, loot
and all, by the way he came. I fully indorsed my particular writer's
opinion that the murderer was an uncommonly cool and clever individual,
especially as I fancy he got clear off and was never afterward laid
hands on.

"When I had done that I thought I had done with the affair altogether.
Not at all. I was regularly ridden with this confounded murder. You see
the banker was rather a swell; everybody knew him: and that, of course,
made it so shocking. So everybody kept talking about him: they were

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