Vain Fortune by George (George Augustus) Moore
page 60 of 203 (29%)
page 60 of 203 (29%)
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face speak or laugh or see again. Although sixty-five, his head was covered
with short, thick, iron-grey hair; the beard, too, was short and thick, and iron-grey. The face was rugged, and when Emily touched the coarse hand, telling of a life of toil, she started--it was singularly cold. Fear and sorrow in like measure choked her, and her soul awoke, and tremblingly she walked out of the house, glad to breathe the sweet evening air. She walked towards the artificial water. The sky was melancholy and grey, and the park lay before her, hushed and soundless. Through the shadows of the darkening island two swans floated softly, leaving behind slight silver lines; above, the swallows flew high in the evening. There was sensation of death, too, in this cold, mournful water, and in the silence that hung about it, and in some vague way it reminded Emily of her own life. She had known little else but death; her life seemed full of death; and those reflections, so distinct and so colourless, were like death. Then, in a sudden expansion of youth she wondered. Her own life, how strange, how personal, how intense! What did it mean, what meaning had it in the great, wide world? And the impressive tranquillity, the pale death of the day, lying like a flower on the water, seemed to symbolise her thought, and she felt more distinctly than she had ever done before. And there arose in her a nervous and passionate interest in herself. She seemed so strange, so wonderful. Her childhood was in itself an enigma. That sad and sorrowful childhood of hers, passed in that old London house; her mother's love for her; her cruel, stern stepfather, and the endless quarrels between her father and mother, which made her young life so unbearable, so wretched, that she could never think of those years without tears rising to her eyes. And then the going away, coming to live with Mr. Burnett! The death of her father and her dear mother, so sudden, following so soon one after the other. How much there had been in her life, how |
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