Chance saved the Schoolmaster from a congestion of the brain which else must have proved mortal. His fall had caused a salutary and abundant bleeding at the nose. He then fell into kind of a feverish torpor--half sleep, half delirium, and then had this wild, this fearful dream!
He was again in Rodolph's house in the Allée des Veuves. The saloon in which the miscreant had received his appalling punishment had not undergone any alteration. Rodolph himself was sitting at the table on which were the Schoolmaster's papers and the little _Saint-Esprit_ of _lapis_ which he had given to the Chouette. Rodolph's countenance was grave and sad. On his right the negro David was standing motionless and silent; on his left was the Chourineur, who looked on with a bewildered mien. In his dream the Schoolmaster was no longer blind, but saw through a medium of clear blood, which filled the cavities of his eyeballs. All and everything seemed to him tinted with red. As birds of prey hover on motionless wing above the head of the victim which they fascinate before they devour, so a monstrous screech-owl (_chouette_), having for its head the hideous visage of the one-eyed hag, soared over the Schoolmaster, keeping fixed on him her round, glaring, and green eye. This fixed stare was upon his breast like a heavy weight. The Schoolmaster discerned a vast lake of blood separating him from the table at which Rodolph was seated. Then this inflexible judge, as well as the Chourineur and the negro, grew and grew, expanding into colossal proportions, until they touched the ceiling; and then it also became higher in proportion. The lake of blood was calm, and as unruffled as a red mirror; the Schoolmaster saw his hideous countenance reflected therein. Then that was suddenly effaced by the tumult of the swelling waves. From their troubled surface there arose a vapour resembling the foul exhalation of a marsh, a livid-coloured mist of that violet hue peculiar to the lips of the dead. In proportion as this miasma rises--rises, the faces of Rodolph, the Chourineur, and the negro continue to expand and expand in an extraordinary manner, and always remain above this fearful cloud. In the midst of the awful vapour, the Schoolmaster sees the pale ghosts, and those murderous scenes in which he had been the actor. In this fantastic mirage he first sees a little bald-headed old man, clad in a long brown coat, and wearing an eye-shade of green silk. He is employing himself in a dilapidated chamber in counting and arranging pieces of gold into piles by the light of a lamp. Through the window, lighted by the dim moonlight reflected on the tops of some high trees waving in the wind, the Schoolmaster recognises his own figure. Pressing his distorted features against the glass, following every motion of the old man with glaring eyes, then breaking a pane, he opens the window itself, leaps with a bound upon his victim, and stabs him between the shoulders with his long and keen knife. The movement is so rapid, the blow so quick and sure, that the dead body of the old man remains seated in the chair.