The Ebony Frame by E. Nesbit (best ebook reader ubuntu txt) π
"Oh! my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you again?"
No thought, then, of my whole life's completion and consummation being a dream.
I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred and her mother were coming to lunch.
I remembered, at one o'clock, Mildred coming and her existence.
Now indeed the dream began.
With a penetrating sense of the futility of any action apart from her, I gave the necessary orders for the reception of my guests. When Mildred and her mother came I received them with cordiality; but my genial phrases all seemed to be someone else's. My voice sounded like an echo; my heart was not there.
Still, the situation was not intolerable, until the hour when afternoon tea was served in the drawing-room. Mildred and mother kept the conversational pot boiling with
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As I reached the first floor I felt arms about my neck. The smoke was too thick for me to distinguish features.
βSave me,β a voice whispered. I clasped a figure in my arms and bore it with a strange disease, down the shaking stairs and out into safety. It was Mildred. I knew that directly I clasped her.
βStand back,β cried the crowd.
βEveryoneβs safe,β cried a fireman.
The flames leaped from every window The sky grew redder and redder. I sprang from the hands that would have held me. I leaped up the steps. I crawled up the stairs. Suddenly the whole horror came to me. βAs long as my picture remains in the ebony frame.β What if picture and frame perished together?
I fought with the fire and with my own choking inability to fight with it. I pushed on. I must save my picture. I reached the drawing room.
As I sprang in, I saw my lady, I swear it, through the smoke and the flames, hold out her arms to me β to me β who came too late to save her, and to save my own lifeβs joy. I never saw her again.
Before I could reach her, or cry out to her, I felt the floor yield beneath my feet, and I fell into the flames below.
How did they save me? What does that matter? They saved me somehow β curse them. Every stick of my auntβs furniture was destroyed. My friends pointed out that, as the furniture was heavily insured, the carelessness of a nightly-studious housemaid had done me no harm.
No harm!
That was how I won and lost my only love.
I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty; but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness β ah, no β it is the rest of life that is the dream.
But, if I think that, why have I married Mildred and grown stout, and dull, and prosperous?
I tell you, it is all this that is the dream; my dear lady only is the reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream?
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