Fathers and daughters -- Fiction; Social classes -- England -- Fiction
Jim was in the dark now, with a vengeance; but he could dream Dolly out
of her grave, and did it, in this dream. It was a dream of the day he
met her, when he came off his first voyage, a mere boy, and a perfect
stranger to her. There was the bar he and his mates off the _Pera_ had
trooped into for refreshment, just paid off and feeling good, with
money in their pockets. There were the square bottles with names on
the glass, and the round ones all over labels, and the pump-handles
in a row that Dolly's red-faced cousin Jane, the barmaid, was in the
confidence of, but which everyone else would have pulled wrong. There,
too, was the girl that came in behind the bar and berthed up alongside
the red-faced cousin, just as Murtagh O'Rourke called back to him
through the swing-door, "We're lavin' ye behind, James, me boy," and
vanished. And the girl was Dolly--Dolly herself. Jim didn't know in his
dream that he had married Dolly since, and that she was dead--not he!
It was all new and young again, and in a moment he would hear Dolly say
what she did then, when after some chat--during which the eyes of each
saw the other solely, Dolly's flinchingly, Jim's greedily--the red face
was called away and left them. Yes!--he knew what she would say, "You
never daren't come across to me," and that he in defiance of all Law
and Order would be over that bar like a shot, and then would be driven
forth by the righteous rage of the returning barmaid, with the remains
of a kiss on his lips, the spoil of war in this audacious enterprise.
And all the sequel of the story--how Dolly ran after him to say he
might come back, under reserves; and the lightning speed of their
unsophisticated courtship, under none--all this he knew in the dream
beforehand, but did not wonder why he knew it--took it as a matter of
course.
It never came off, though, for the dream never got as far as the kiss,
to Jim's bitter disappointment. Jane, the cousin, instead of clearing
out and leaving the introduction to nature, swelled and became redder
still and very hot, and ended inexplicably by becoming the pain that
had passed through so many vicissitudes. Whereupon Jim was awake in
the dark, somewhere. And a man's voice, one good to hear, was saying,
"I'll sit down by him and wait till he wakes, nurse. I promised little
Lizarann I would see him."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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