The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot

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Title: The Lifted Veil

Author: George Eliot

Release Date: April 20, 2005 [eBook #2165]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFTED VEIL***

Transcribed from the 1921 Oxford University Press edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE LIFTED VEIL

Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.

CHAPTER I

The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of
_angina pectoris_; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician
tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many
months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical
constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I
shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly
existence. If it were to be otherwise--if I were to live on to the age
most men desire and provide for--I should for once have known whether the
miseries of delusive expectation can outweigh the miseries of true
provision. For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will
happen in my last moments.

Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in
this chair, in this study, at ten o'clock at night, longing to die, weary
of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.
Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my
lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I
shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the
sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why.
My two servants are lovers, and will have quarrelled. My housekeeper
will have rushed out of the house in a fury, two hours before, hoping
that Perry will believe she has gone to drown herself. Perry is alarmed
at last, and is gone out after her. The little scullery-maid is asleep
on a bench: she never answers the bell; it does not wake he