For the moment, however, he said nothing. But Somers knew from his
dreams what she was feeling: his dreams of a woman, a woman he loved,
something like Harriet, something like his mother, and yet unlike
either, a woman sullen and obstinate against him, repudiating him.
Bitter the woman was grieved beyond words, grieved till her face was
swollen and puffy and almost mad or imbecile, because she had loved him
so much, and now she must see him betray her love. That was how the
dream woman put it: he had betrayed her great love, and she must go down
desolate into an everlasting hell, denied, and denying him absolutely in
return, a sullen, awful soul. The face reminded him of Harriet, and of
his mother, and of his sister, and of girls he had known when he was
younger--strange glimpses of all of them, each glimpse excluding the
last. And at the same time in the terrible face some of the look of that
bloated face of a madwoman which hung over Jane Eyre in the night in Mr
Rochester’s house.
The Somers of the dream was terribly upset. He cried tears from his very
bowels, and laid his hand on the woman’s arm saying:
“But I love you. Don’t you _believe_ in me? Don’t you _believe_ in me?”
But the woman, she seemed almost old now--only shed a few bitter tears,
bitter as vitriol, from her distorted face, and bitterly, hideously
turned away, dragging her arm from the touch of his fingers; turned, as
it seemed to the dream-Somers, away to the sullen and dreary,
everlasting hell of repudiation.
He woke at this, and listened to the thunder of the sea with horror.
With horror. Two women in his life he had loved down to the quick of
life and death: his mother and Harriet. And the woman in the dream was
so awfully his mother, risen from the dead, and at the same time
Harriet, as it were, departing from this life, that he stared at the
night-paleness between the window-curtains in horror.
“They neither of them believed in me,” he said to himself. Still in the
spell of the dream, he put it in the past tense, though Harriet lay
sleeping in the next bed. He could not get over it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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