Ch. 14: The Dream of Duncan Parrenness

Like Mr. Bunyan of old, I, Duncan Parrenness, Writer to the Most
Honourable the East India Company, in this God-forgotten city of
Calcutta, have dreamed a dream, and never since that Kitty my mare fell
lame have I been so troubled. Therefore, lest I should forget my dream,
I have made shift to set it down here. Though Heaven knows how unhandy
the pen is to me who was always readier with sword than ink-horn when I
left London two long years since.

When the Governor-General's great dance (that he gives yearly at the
latter end of November) was finisht, I had gone to mine own room which
looks over that sullen, un-English stream, the Hoogly, scarce so sober
as I might have been. Now, roaring drunk in the West is but fuddled in
the East, and I was drunk Nor'-Nor' Easterly as Mr. Shakespeare might
have said. Yet, in spite of my liquor, the cool night winds (though I
have heard that they breed chills and fluxes innumerable) sobered me
somewhat; and I remembered that I had been but a little wrung and wasted
by all the sicknesses of the past four months, whereas those young
bloods that came eastward with me in the same ship had been all, a month
back, planted to Eternity in the foul soil north of Writers' Buildings.
So then, I thanked God mistily (though, to my shame, I never kneeled
down to do so) for license to live, at least till March should be upon
us again.

Indeed, we that were alive (and our number was less by far than those
who had gone to their last account in the hot weather late past) had
made very merry that evening, by the ramparts of the Fort, over this
kindness of Providence; though our jests were neither witty nor such as
I should have liked my Mother to hear.

When I had lain down (or rather thrown me on my bed) and the fumes of my
drink had a little cleared away, I found that I could get no sleep for
thinking of a thousand things that were better left alone. First, and it
was a long time since I had thought of her, the sweet face of Kitty
Somerset, drifted, as it might have been drawn in a picture, across the
foot of my bed, so plainly, that I almost thought she had been present
in the body. Then I remembered how she drove me to this accursed country
to get rich, that I might the more quickly marry her, our parents on
both sides giving their consent; and then how she thought better (or
worse may be) of her troth, and wed Tom Sanderson but a short three
months after I had sailed. From Kitty I fell a-musing on Mrs.
Vansuythen, a tall pale woman with violet eyes that had come to Calcutta
from the Dutch Factory at Chinsura, and had set all our young men, and
not a few of the factors, by the ears. Some of our ladies, it is true,
said that she had never a husband or marriage-lines at all; but