Clementina

And in a little he dreamed. He dreamed that he was swinging on a gibbet

before the whole populace of Innspruck, that he died to his bewilderment

without any pain whatever, but that pain came to him after he was quite

dead,--not bodily pain at all, but an anguish of mind because the chains

by which he was hanged would groan and creak, and the populace,

mistaking that groaning for his cries, scoffed at him and ridiculed his

King for sending to rescue the Princess Clementina a marrowless thing

that could not die like a man. Wogan stirred in his sleep and waked up.

The rain had ceased, and a light wind blew across the country. Outside

the sign-board creaked and groaned upon its stanchion. Once he became

aware of that sound he could no longer sleep for listening to it; and at

last he sprang out of bed, and leaning out of the window lifted the

sign-board off the stanchion and into his bedroom.

It was a plain white board without any device on it. "True," thought

Wogan, "the man wants a new name for his inn." He propped the board

against the left side of his bed, since that was nearest to the window,

got between the sheets, and began to think over names. He turned on his

right side and fell asleep again.

He was not to sleep restfully that night. He waked again, but very

slowly, and without any movement of his body. He lay with his face

towards the door, dreamily considering that the landlord, for all his

pride in his new paint, had employed a bad workman who had left a black

strip of the door unpainted,--a fairly wide strip, too, which his host

should never have overlooked.

Wogan was lazily determining to speak to the landlord about it when his

half-awakened mind was diverted by a curious phenomenon, a delusion of

the eyes such as he had known to have befallen him before when he had

stared for a long while on any particular object: the strip of black

widened and widened. Wogan waited for it to contract, as it would be

sure to do. But it did not contract, and--so Wogan waked up completely.

He waked up with a shock of the heart, with all his senses startled and

strained. But he had been gradually waking before, and so by neither

movement nor cry did he betray that he was awake. He had not locked the

door of his room; that widening strip of black ran vertically down from

the lintel to the ground and between the white door and the white door

frame. The door was being cautiously pushed open; the strip of black was

the darkness of the passage coming through.