But at this noisy station the people were very active. And before the good woman could collect her faculties the coach started, and she herself was again precipitated down into the land of “Nod.”
Drusilla could not sleep again, so to ease her position she sat up and reclined back in the corner of her seat, and in a dreamy, half-conscious condition she gazed through the opposite window.
At first it seemed but a solid wall of darkness past which the coach was so swiftly whirling; but gradually, as her eyes accustomed themselves to the circumstances, this darkness grew less opaque, this obscurity less impenetrable, until at length she could dimly discern the boundaries of mountains, valleys, forests, and the outlines of rocks, trees and buildings.
At long intervals she could perceive the form of some solitary farm-house, with its barn, shed, cattle-pen, field, orchard and garden. Half waking, she would wonder who lived and worked there; and half sleeping, she would people the place with the beings of her dream.
Sometimes she saw a lonely woodcutter’s cottage on the edge of a forest, and vaguely conjectured what sort of life its denizens led. Once in such a place she saw a single light burning in the tiny window of a little upper chamber, in the interior of which the shadow of a woman was bending over the shadow of a sick-bed. She had but a glimpse of all this, as the coach rolled past, yet her ready sympathies went forth to the poor watcher and the suffering invalid.
Once she was treated to a brilliant picture in the darkness—an oasis in the desert. It was a bran new, commodious country house, well seated on a hill; lights were glancing from every window; music was borne forth upon the wind; even in that inclement weather, somebody seemed to be giving a great party and to be keeping it up all night. But before she could observe more the coach had rushed by and left the festive scene far behind.
Once she noticed a little road-side hut, and in its doorway, a poor, old woman, thinly clad, holding a lantern in her hand and bending outward in an attitude of intense anxiety, as if looking for some one. “In her poor way, she is watching and waiting, as I used to do. Has she a husband, or perhaps a son, who is breaking her heart?” mused Drusilla, as the coach swung onward and left this sad picture also in its rear.
Such signs of life, however, were very rare, on that lonely road, at that late hour. The few hamlets, farms and huts they passed were for the most part shut up, dark and silent as graves.
But they were now penetrating deeper and deeper into the mountain fastnesses; and farm-houses and villages were fewer and farther between. For miles and miles nothing but the most savage solitudes loomed in the blackness of darkness through which they passed. And Drusilla, reclining back in her corner, dreamily gazing forth through the rain-dimmed window upon this obscure scene, vaguely wondered when these solitudes would be peopled, when this wilderness would “bloom and blossom as the rose.”
And so, while all her fellow-passengers were deeply buried in unconsciousness, she dreamed on her waking dream. But often in the midst of these reveries the sudden sharp recollection of her own trouble pierced her heart like a sword and drew from her lips a bitter groan. Then again the influence of the scene and hour, the obscurity, the picturesqueness, the rocking motion of the coach, the soothing sound of the falling rain without, the silence and stillness of all within, lulled her senses to repose if not to sleep.