Yet, all the same, it was singular that, between her intervals of
weeping and sobbing, and when she had at last cried herself to sleep,
she should have been tormented with such frightful dreams as those
which came to her. Dreams of horrors that in their weirdness became
almost ludicrous, or would have been ludicrous to those who, knowing
of them, did not happen to be experiencing them. Thus, the idea of a
crocodile regarding one with a glittering eye from its ambush in the
sand, seems for some reason, in our waking moments, to conjure up a
comical sense of terror--perhaps because of the 'glittering eye'; yet
there was nothing comical about it to the mind of Bella as she awoke
with a shriek from her sleep after the vision of the creature had had
momentary existence in the cells of her brain. And, even when she was
thoroughly awakened and knew that she had only been suffering from a
bad dream, she still shuddered at the recollection, and muttered, 'It
appeared as if it was creeping towards me to seize me with its horrid
jaws! Oh, it was dreadful!'
Then she slept again--only, however, to dream of other things. Of a
desolate shore at first, with, upon it, a misty creature waving its
hands mournfully above its head, those hands being enveloped in some
gauzy material, so that the figure appeared more like a skirt-dancer
than aught else; then, of two lions fighting savagely; and then of a
vast black cave with an opening as high as St. Paul's and as wide as a
railway terminus is long, against which, armed with a spear and
protected with a buckler, she seemed to stand trembling. Trembling,
too, because she could not see one yard into the deep and profound
darkness before her, yet into which, as she peered furtively and with
horror, she appeared to perceive things--forms half-animal and
half-human--crawling, revolving, creeping about. Then, again, she
awoke with a start.
But by now the room was light with the gray, mournful glimmer of the
approaching dawn; so light that she could see her wicker-basket trunks
in their American-cloth wrappers standing by the wall, with the lids
open against it; soon, too, she heard the sparrows twittering outside,
as well as other congenial suburban sounds, such as the newspaper boys
shrieking hideously to one another, and the milkman uttering piercing
yells; and--though it was her last day in England--she was glad to
spring out of bed and know herself once more a unit in the actual
world instead of a wanderer in a world of dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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