Devereux's Dream Page #4

"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

								

and then I called people to me, and--and the Paris express went on
without that particular carriage.

"The inquiry began before some local authority next day. Very little
came of it. What could come of it, unless they had convicted me of the
murder of this child I would have given my own life to save?

"They might have done that at home; but they knew better here, and
didn't. They couldn't find me the actual assassin, however; though I
believe they did their best. All they found was his weapon, which he
most purposely have left behind. I asked for this, and got it. It gave
their police no clue; and it gave me none. But I had a fancy for it.

"It was a plain, double-edged, admirably-tempered dagger--a very
workmanlike article indeed. On the cross hilt of it I swore one day that
I would live thenceforth for one thing alone--the discovery of the
murderer of old D'Avray's child, whom I had promised him to care for
before all. When I had found this man, whoever he was, I also swore that
I would kill him. Kill him myself, you understand; without any of the
law's delay or uncertainty, without troubling bourreau or hangman.
Kill him as he had killed her--to do this was what I meant to live for.
There was war to the knife between him and me.

"I started, of course, under one heavy disadvantage. He knew me,
probably, whereas I didn't know him at all. When he found that his
amiable intention of fixing the crime on me had been frustrated, it
must, I imagined, have occurred to him that the said crime might
eventually be fixed by me on him. And he had proved himself to be a
person who didn't stick at trifles. It behooved me, therefore, to go to
work cautiously. But I hadn't fought Indians for nothing; and I was
very cautious. I waited quiet till I got a clue. It was a curious one;
and I got it in this way. It struck me one day, suddenly, that I had
heard of a murder precisely similar to this already. I could not at
first call the thing to mind; but presently I remembered--my dream. And
then I asked myself this: Had not this murder been done before my eyes
three years ago?

"I came to the conclusion that the circumstances of the murder in my
dream were absolutely identical with the circumstances of the actual
crime. Yes; the girl whose face in that dream I had never been able to
see was Lucille. Yes; the assassin whose face I had seen so plainly in
that dream was the real assassin. In short, I believe that the murder
had been rehearsed before me three years previous to its actual
committal.

"Now this sounds rather wild. Yet I came to this conviction quite coolly
and deliberately. It was a conviction. Assuming it to be true, the
odds against me grew shorter directly; for I had the portrait of the
man I wanted drawn by myself the day after I had seen him in my dream.
And the original of that portrait was a man not to be easily mistaken,
supposing him to exist at all. The day I came across that sketch of him
in that old forgotten sketch-book of mine, I was as sure he did exist as
that I was alive myself. What I had to do was to find this man, and then
I never doubted I should find the man I wanted. You see how the odds had
shortened. If he knew me I knew him now, and he had no notion that I did
know him. It was a good deal fairer fight between us.

"I fought it out alone. My story was hardly one the Rue de Jérusalem
would have acted upon; and, besides, I wanted no interference. So, with
the portrait before me, I sat down and began to consider who this man
was, and why he had murdered that child. The big, burly frame, the heavy
yellow face, the sandy-yellow hair, the physiognomy generally, was
Teutonic. My man I put down as a North German. Now there were, and are
probably, plenty of men who would have no objection whatever to put a
knife into me, if they got the chance; but this man, whom I had never
met, could have had no such quarrel as theirs with me. His quarrel with
me must have been, then, Lucille. Yes, that was it--Lucille. I began to
see clearly: a thwarted, devilish passion--a cool, infernal revenge. The
child had feared something of this sort; had perhaps seen him that
night. This explained her nervous terror, her nervous anxiety to stop
nowhere, to travel on. In that carriage of that express-train, alone
with me--where could she be safer? This accounted, too, for her anxiety
to reach England. He would not dare follow her there, she had thought,
or, at least, could not without my noticing him. And then she would have
told me. She had not told me before evidently because she had feared for
me too, in a quarrel with this man. She must, innocent child as she
was, have had some instinctive knowledge of what he was capable.... Ay,
a cool, infernal revenge, indeed. To kill her; to fix the murder on me.
That dagger he had left behind.... The apparent impossibility of any
one's entering the carriage as he must have entered it at all, to say
nothing of the almost absolute impossibility of his doing so without
disturbing either of us,--you see it might have gone hard with me if a
British jury had had to decide on the case.

"Well, to cut this as short as may be, I made up my mind that the man I
wanted was a North German; that he had conceived a hideous passion for
Lucille before I knew her; that she had shrunk from it and him so
unmistakably, that he knew he had no chance; that my taking her away as
my wife, to which he might have been a witness, drove him to as hideous
a revenge; that, hearing we were going to England, and seeing that we
were likely to stop nowhere on the way, and so give him a chance of
doing what he had made up his mind to do, he had decided to do what he
had done as he had done it,--counting on finding us asleep as he had
found us, or on his strength if it came to a fight between him and me;
but coolly reckless enough to brave everything in any case. And the
devil aiding, he had in great part and only too well succeeded. He was
now either so far satisfied that, if I made no move against him--and
how, he might think, could I?--he, feeling himself all safe, would let
me be; or, on the other hand, he did not feel safe, and was not
satisfied, and was arranging for my being disposed of by and by. I
considered the latter frame of mind as his most probable one; I went to
work cautiously, as I say. I ascertained that Lucille had made no
mention of any obnoxious prétendant at any time; I didn't expect to
find she had, her terror of the man was too intense. But this man must
have met her somewhere--where?

"When old D'Avray came home to die, his daughter was just leaving her
Paris pensionnat. All through his last illness he had seen no visitor
but me, and Lucille had never quitted him. Besides, I had been there all
the time. I presumed, then, that this man and she had met in Paris; and
I believe they were only likely to have met at one of the half-dozen

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