It was on that Sunday night that Olwen Phillips of Croeswen dreamed her
wonderful dream. She was a girl of sixteen, the daughter of small
farming people, and for many months she had been doomed to certain
death. Consumption, which flourishes in that damp, warm climate, had
laid hold of her; not only her lungs but her whole system was a mass of
tuberculosis. As is common enough, she had enjoyed many fallacious brief
recoveries in the early stages of the disease, but all hope had long
been over, and now for the last few weeks she had seemed to rush
vehemently to death. The doctor had come on the Saturday morning,
bringing with him a colleague. They had both agreed that the girl's case
was in its last stages. "She cannot possibly last more than a day or
two," said the local doctor to her mother. He came again on the Sunday
morning and found his patient perceptibly worse, and soon afterwards she
sank into a heavy sleep, and her mother thought that she would never
wake from it.
The girl slept in an inner room communicating with the room occupied by
her father and mother. The door between was kept open, so that Mrs.
Phillips could hear her daughter if she called to her in the night. And
Olwen called to her mother that night, just as the dawn was breaking.
It was no faint summons from a dying bed that came to the mother's ears,
but a loud cry that rang through the house, a cry of great gladness.
Mrs. Phillips started up from sleep in wild amazement, wondering what
could have happened. And then she saw Olwen, who had not been able to
rise from her bed for many weeks past, standing in the doorway in the
faint light of the growing day. The girl called to her mother: "Mam!
mam! It is all over. I am quite well again."
Mrs. Phillips roused her husband, and they sat up in bed staring, not
knowing on earth, as they said afterwards, what had been done with the
world. Here was their poor girl wasted to a shadow, lying on her
death-bed, and the life sighing from her with every breath, and her
voice, when she last uttered it, so weak that one had to put one's ear
to her mouth. And here in a few hours she stood up before them; and even
in that faint light they could see that she was changed almost beyond
knowing. And, indeed, Mrs. Phillips said that for a moment or two she
fancied that the Germans must have come and killed them in their sleep,
and so they were all dead together. But Olwen called, out again, so the
mother lit a candle and got up and went tottering across the room, and
there was Olwen all gay and plump again, smiling with shining eyes. Her
mother led her into her own room, and set down the candle there, and
felt her daughter's flesh, and burst into prayers and tears of wonder
and delight, and thanksgivings, and held the girl again to be sure that
she was not deceived. And then Olwen told her dream, though she thought
it was not a dream.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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