A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 9., Mark Twain [best short books to read txt] 📗

good-bye....  Sandy!  Yes, you are there.  I lost myself a moment, and I thought you were gone....  Have I been sick long?  It must be so; it seems months to me.  And such dreams! such strange and awful dreams, Sandy!  Dreams that were as real as reality—delirium, of course, but so real!  Why, I thought the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn't get home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I and a handful of my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England! But even that was not the strangest.  I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest!  Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! between me and my home and my friends! between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living!  It was awful—awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy.  Ah, watch by me, Sandy—stay by me every moment—don't let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with the torture of those hideous dreams—I cannot endure that again.... Sandy?..."

He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death.  Presently his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign I knew that his end was at hand with the first suggestion of the death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed to listen:  then he said:

"A bugle?...  It is the king!  The drawbridge, there!  Man the battlements!—turn out the—"

He was getting up his last "effect"; but he never finished it.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Part 9., by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)